Fidelistas and el Che: Changing Visions of Latin American Society

SS 234 Zapatistas, Fidelistas, and el Che: Changing Visions of Latin American Society (with Carolee Bengelsdorf) Focusing on the last half of the 20th century, this course deals with the range of ideas in Latin America about how the continent should be revolutionized or reconceptualized. It examines, among other cases, the Cuban Revolution, the Zapatista Revolt, and the Peruvian Shining Path uprising. These movements and their particular contexts signal fundamental shifts in the way latin Americans have conceptualized their entrance into the "developed modern world," and tus pose alternative visions to a Eurocentric model of modernity and postmodernity. In paradoxical ways and from a variety of perspectives, Latin American visions of modernity and postmodernity seem at once the demise and the birth of traditions, the centralization and the decentralization of states, the end and the beginnnig of histories, and the reassertion of or challenge to nationalism. Each of the examples we examine enacts very different answers to these questions.