Soy pan, soy paz, soy más - انا خبز، انا سلام، انا ما بعد

“I had to come all the way to Mexico to rediscover Palestine,” writes literary scholar Amal Eqeiq about her visit to the Mayan village of Chamula. The visible and invisible borders that separated ethnic populations, and the uneven infrastructure and resources on each side, created for her a “dramatic déjà-vu of internal colonialism” that brought her back to her native Palestine. What might we rediscover, notice, or see differently, when looking across the Atlantic from the Arab World to Latin America, and back? What contours, constellations and legacies can we trace between parts of the world infrequently considered side by side? The course highlights the cross-Atlantic historical, discursive, cultural and material resonances between Latin America and the Arab world as well as the anxieties that these resonances provoke. We will engage in border thinking to probe, among other things, the porosity of al-Andalous; trace the transatlantic trajectory of Yerba Mate and interrogate the architecture of occupation/separation in Mexico and Palestine through various texts, films, modes of inquiry and pedagogical approaches.

Transregional and translocal alliances (especially in the form of South/South dialogue) that span the Atlantic are providing impetus for collective political strategies once again. This course proposes to engage in cross-regional analysis through various texts, films, modes of inquiry and pedagogical approaches. We will begin from the specificity of the Iberian peninsula and the year 1492 marking the year of the (Re-)conquista which will provide the impetus for our cross-disciplinary exploration of a series of interrelated historical processes.

We will then turn our attention to the ‘Latin East Initiative’, an exploration of comparative indigeneity and liberatory artistic praxis in shared forms of theatre, cartoon, (rap) music and film.