21st Century Latin American Narrative & Digital Storytelling

In this course, a Digital Humanities practicum focusing on cultural and community identities in 21st century Latin America, we will read written work by novelists and short story writers, and explore self-published multimedia narratives by digital creators—filmmakers, podcasters, community historians, musicians, independent journalists, and visual and performance artists—from four regions of Latin America: the Southern Cone, the Andes, the Caribbean, and Mexico and the cultural borderlands with the United States (and one writer from Equatorial Guinea). We will study written and digital representations of interconnected personal and cultural concerns—family lives, personal strengths and knowledge, playfulness and maturation, imagined futures and other illusions, political and economic change and demographic effects across socioeconomic groups, lived experiences of religious minorities, performative and gender identities, immigration and internal migration, and health status. We’ll think about what stories are being told now, about whom, and how. What overlaps are there between the forms, styles, regions, and identities in these stories? How do all these stories form the “new generation” of communicators of Latin American experiences?