| Course Description |
“Los cuatro puntos cardinales son tres: el norte y el sur,” the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro
wrote with sharp humor in Altazor o el viaje en paracaídas (Altazor or the Voyage in a
Parachute): “The four cardinal points are three: North and South.” The North/South division is
not the only marker of spatial, geopolitical, economic, or ideological inequalities; several other
divides compete with it as the axis around which our global order is structured: West/the rest,
center/periphery, urban/rural, public/private, land/sea, common/enclosed, developed/developing,
colonial/postcolonial, without forgetting the old ideological divisions of First, Second, Third, and
Fourth Worlds. In response to such spatial divides, this course will explore a range of critical
attempts in art, literature, the social sciences and the theoretical humanities to map out the
unequal organization of the current world order. Studying concepts of so-called “primitive” or
“originary” accumulation, land appropriation, dispossession, uneven development, real
abstraction, and neo-extractivism with a particular focus on Latin America, we will circle back to
the question of how to imagine a cartography that might be critical of the current hegemonies
without increasing the worldwide zones of invisibility and inequality that sustain them.
This course is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of Columbia University’s
Center for Spatial Research's series of seminars on topics related to spatial inequality.
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