| 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.
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