HART 566: LATIN AMER BODIES:ON MODERNISM
Fall 2025 · Section 901 · CRN 15520
Designed as a laboratory of ideas and forms, this seminar will probe critical perspectives on art and architecture’s relation to society and science. Focusing on the different ways the “modern” body has been portrayed by intellectuals and artists—as mechanized, controlled, Taylorized, and regimented—we will explore theories of the body and its inevitable entanglement within technology and economics. Avoiding the narrow view of aesthetic modernism and considering the immanent complexities of the triad modernism-modernity-modernization from the perspective of developing regions such as Latin America, this seminar examines the racialized, gendered, colonized, and medicalized body as a crucial discursive zone where politics and ethics, and science and ideology intercept. We will focus on critical theoretical and philosophical texts–from Early Structuralism to Disability Studies and Posthumanism–by French thinkers such as Georges Canguilhem, Michel Serres, Jacques Derrida, Georges Bataille, Roger Callois, Michael Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Luce Irigaray–and we will look at modern Latin American & Latin European art, architecture and urban planning strategies as sites of exploration. Each week, we will examine a theorist, an artist, and/or an architect.
- Credits
- 3
- Instructors
- Maria Fabiola Lopez Duran