SPN 325 - BRUJERÍA in Latin American Cultures

Course unit(s): 1
Meets GAR (students beginning prior to Fall 2024): Meets general academic requirements HU and DE.
Prerequisite(s): SNC 303 Spanish for Heritage Speakers II or SNC 304 Texts & Contexts or permission of instructor
This course explores Latin American and Caribbean culture and its connections with Europe and Africa through references to witches, witchcraft, and alternative forms of religion and power exercised by women, including practices from Santería, Palo Monte and other Afro-Caribbean religions. While most of the readings are by 20th and 21st century writers, we will trace the origin of many of these tropes, and their re-intervention in the present. We will investigate as well how violence against women has often times being justified as a deviation from morality and religion, and how literature and the arts have represented these topics. With a wide lens on how many women or queer bodies have been considered deviants, dangerous, and deemed punishable, this class will look at how colonialism and its aftermath shaped discourses around religion in the Americas, and how different media: legal documents, visual arts, film, novels, and theater, have represented and contested those discourses and bodies, and the social misconceptions around them. We will pay special attention to the historical context in which these works are produced, and to the how ideas of brujería have changed across time, until present day. What is brujería in the context of Latin America and the Caribbean? What new meanings are still possible from performing brujería? The course will include an approach to local practices of brujería in the Lehigh Valley, and will allow for creative/artistic expression as part of our class assignments.