Literature and Culture Classes
Arts One b: Authority and Resistance
Spanish 401 is an intensely practical introduction to the art and skill of translation both from Spanish to English and English to Spanish. Through a variety of activities from different professional specializations (Business, Journalism, Public Relations, and Literary and Cultural Studies), students will work through translation theories and techniques, grammatical and structural overlaps (or divergences) between Spanish and English, and grapple with questions of fidelity and fluidity when interpreting voice, culture, and text. This course also provides a brief introduction to simultaneous interpretation as it is done in the professional settings studied. Ultimately, students will improve writing skills and fluency in Spanish and overall understanding of the translation process and all of its intricacies. Participants must be highly proficient in both Spanish and English.
In SPAN 406, students will evaluate how different Spanish American authors from the 17th – 20th centuries explore the idea of gender as a category of analysis in literature situated in diverse enclosed spaces (the convent, the jail cell, the psychological institution, and others). More specifically, we will evaluate how selected authors promote or move away from the “normative” codes of gender present in society and if and when such codes incorporate and/or compete with other identity categories such as race, class, and ethnicity, and so on. As one of the overarching goals of the course is to engage students in scholarly dialogues on gender, students will explore the construction, performance, and variations of gender through critical and theoretical approaches to the topic and in relation to the literary corpus of the course.
Masking Revolution Subcomandante Marcos and the Contemporary Zapatista Movement examines the historical shift from a Cold War to a post-Cold War Latin America in order to explain how and why the Zapatista Movement in Mexico began as a utopian revolutionary campaign that strictly followed Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s foco theory and ended up as a symbolic war against injustice – an (inter)national campaign for “absolute democracy” that promoted an imagined community or utopia of the twenty-first century. Within this framework, I dissect how Subcomandante Marcos’s revolutionary performances use words, fictional characters (heteronyms), and masks as tactics with practical utopian effects, always rooted in the land.
In “From Machista to New Man?: Omar Cabezas Negotiates Manhood from the Mountain in Nicaragua,” I examine how a new masculinity emerges in Nicaraguan Omar Cabezas’ political bildungsroman La montaña es algo más que una inmensa estepa verde (1982). By using theories by Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva and Slavoj Zizek, who propose gender as a category in flux, I demonstrate how the surface of what is repressed by a bourgeois society – the body, emotions, sexuality, and the scatological – seeps through the cracks of Cabezas’ revolutionary narrative to build up a heterogeneous and contradictory model of manhood that is reformulated in response to the historical needs and demands of the Sandinista Revolutionary project. In my analysis it becomes clear that the new male code embodied in the Sandinista emerges on the mountain, the domain in which rebels experience the ideological limits of core bourgeois loci like the family, knowledge and the future. The centrality of the mountain to Cabezas’ revolutionary discourse and self-construction as a man and guerrilla rebel suggests that this space is the geography upon which men struggle to break with traditional machista praxis dominant in bourgeois societies and redefine their male identity in relation to the mountain and the men living there.
La masculinidad en crisis: un estudio sobre el deterioro del sujeto masculino en La nada cotidiana (1995) de Zoé Valdés
En este trabajo prestaremos nuestra atención al corpus literario de Zoé Valdés (exiliada en París en 1995), quien escribe dentro de una tradición femenina y nacional cubana. En su visión del mundo cubano, nadie se escapa de los terrores del régimen castrista. No obstante, tal vez el grupo más afectado sean los hombres. En una sociedad machista como la cubana, el hombre tiene la reputación de ser fuerte, racional e independiente. Sin embargo, al encontrarse en medio de una sociedad en crisis, dicho sujeto se ve forzado a ceder ante un estado poderoso que lo reprime, descentra y amenaza al hacerle huir de su sociedad, temer la autoridad y cuestionar su propia masculinidad. En este estudio, me dispongo a dilucidar dicho descentramiento del hombre como es visto en los personajes el padre de Yocandra, el Traidor, el Lince y el Nihilista. Dichos hombres representan las estrategias que se utilizan para intentar a confrontar la victimización del régimen castrista durante el “período especial”.
Masculinity in Crisis: a study on the deterioration of the male subject in Zoé Valdes’ La nada cotidiana (1995).
In this paper, I analyze Zoé Valdés’novel, La nada cotidiana (1995). Valdés writes within a feminine and national Cuban context and in her vision of Cuban society, few escape the terrors of Fidel Castro’s regime. However, perhaps among those most affected by the changes in post-revolutionary Cuban society are the men. Due to the influence of machismo in Cuba, men developed a reputation of being strong, rational, and independent beings. Nevertheless, when the Cuban men represented in the present novel find themselves in the midst of a social crisis, they are unable to react before the repressive Cuban state which will later cause these men to flee from their own society, to fear authority, and to question their own masculinity. In this study, I will examine the aforementioned conflict of men in Cuban society as it is manifested in the masculine protagonists of Valdes’ novel: Yocandra’s father, the Traitor, Lince, and the Nihilist. These men represent the strategies men use to confront the victimization of Castro’s regime during the “Special Period” (1989-1995). See full article here Article La nada cotidiana.
Revolutions challenge the status quo. Revolutionary leaders think differently. They imagine change in times of conflict. Span 280 is an introduction to major icons, concepts, practices, and discourses of revolt and revolution in Latin America from 1910-present. We will read first-hand accounts of “Revolution” written by and about some of the most prevalent rebel leaders – Emiliano Zapata, Che Guevara, Gioconda Belli, Omar Cabezas, and the rebel formerly known as Subcomandante Marcos – while studying the intersections of literary, political, and cultural production (music, art, and film) in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua. See the Term 2 2019 Syllabus Spanish 280 here.
In April of 2016, I completed UBC’s International Program for the Scholarship of Teaching, Learning and Educational Leadership (2015-2016). This program sparked my interest in carrying out original practice-based research on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) and Educational Leadership (SoEL).
My capstone project (SoTL Leadership Presentation (2016) for UBC’s International Program for the Scholarship of Teaching, Learning and Educational Leadership (2015-2016) program, highlights the process through which the FHIS Writing Centre – a peer-based writing centre – became a multilingual Learning Centre that boasts a holistic and community-oriented approach to learning additional languages here at UBC, following, D. Cooperrider’s appreciative inquiry methodology. I recently presented the initial findings of this original research in Moving Beyond the Page TYCA-PNWCA at the 2016 meeting of the 2016 TYCA-PNWCA Conference.
My doctoral dissertation, “Cracking the Male Code: The Politicization of Gender in Latin American Guerrilla Literature (2009),” explores how and why a new masculinity that struggles to break with traditional machista praxis dominant in patriarchal societies emerges in five rebel narratives that represent different phases in the history of Latin American revolutions beginning with the Cuban Revolution (1959) and ending with the Contemporary Zapatista Movement in Mexico (1994). Beyond this concrete research focus, I am interested in evaluating how literature is used as a tool to reflect upon and disseminate images and views of the power dynamics of political change, in particular, the New Song Movements of the 60s and beyond, shaped initially by voices such as Silvio Rodríguez (Cuba), Victor Jara (Chile), and Mercedes Sosa (Argentina), among others, and then adapted to the new global context through international artists like Manú Chao (former leader of Mano Negra) and Zack de la Mota (Rage Against the Machine).
In addition to my interests in the intersections of literature and politics, after completing UBC’s International Program for the Scholarship of Teaching, Learning and Educational Leadership (2015-2016), I have also begun to carry out original practice-based research on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) and Educational Leadership (SoEL) as a means to root my approaches to teaching, learning and leadership in existing scholarly practices. I am particularly interested in community-oriented approaches to skill-focused language learning. My paper “Strategic Visioning: Analyzing for a Multilingual Learning Centre in FHIS,” highlights the process through which I transformed the FHIS Writing Centre, a peer-based writing centre, into a broad-reaching Multilingual Learning Centre that boasts a holistic and community-oriented approach to learning additional languages here at UBC. Here is a link to a recent conference presentation on this topic at the 2016 meeting of the 2016 TYCA-PNWCA Conference Moving Beyond the Page TYCA-PNWCA.
