The relationship between politics and literature is clearly mediated by tension. The history of literature records numerous attempts to put literature at the service of some particular political cause or project. Against them, there are also strong claims for autonomy and “Art for art’s sake” or formulas that assign literature a critical power to the extent that it keeps within its specific sphere of action. More radical approaches claim that the politics of literature should exclusively be found in the ground-breaking forms and aesthetic dissent.
In Latin America, this relationship has adopted specific characteristics linked to certain historical junctures and political challenges. Some of these crucial events are the independence of the metropolises, the founding of the republics, the Mexican revolution, the nationalisms of the mid-century, the Cuban and Sandinista revolutions, the civic-military dictatorships of the last decades of the 20th-century, the hegemony of neoliberalism during the 1990s and its subsequent crisis. In the face of these scenarios, literature never remained silent, but the modes of intervention were never unique or necessarily realistic in their ways of addressing the problem.
The role of the intellectual and his/her political commitment to the situation of the subaltern sectors will be also a fundamental concern of Latin American writers from José Martí onwards. Over time, the commitment of literature branched out into a series of expressions that would depart from the civic commitment with the national project shown by some 19th-century writers to become involved in indigenous struggles, environmentalism and, recently, very markedly in feminist and sexual dissidence demands.
The course proposes an analytical approach to different articulations between literature and politics in Latin America. Some of the cases that might be studied are related to the positioning of the romantics, the positivists and the first modernists in the 19th-century, the avant-garde, the representatives of social literature and the boom writers in the 20th-century, and the environmentalists, the feminists, and postmodernist writers in the last decades.