Staging Revolt: Masses, Multitudes & Pol

This course traces the birth and development of the mass and the multitude as new and distinctive political actors in the context of Hispanic modernities. From the Esquilache revolts in Spain and the Atahualpa or Tupac Amaru rebellions in Latin America in the XVIIIth Century to the Argentine Cacerolazo in 2001, the 15M movement in Spain in 2011 or the International Women Strike in 2018, the role of these collective political subjects will be considered as a spatial and performative intervention in the public sphere. Public spaces become stages where protests take the form of experimental and alternative models of social interaction. Political goals are pursued through the transformation of quotidian behaviors, spaces and stories; cities become canvases on which tentative maps are drawn, functioning as potential scripts for new social and political structures. Literary and visual primary sources (e.g. Echeverría, Lamborghini, Poniatowska, Galdós, Goya, Genovés) along with journalistic accounts and testimonies, will be put in dialogue with theoretical texts (e.g. Le Bon, Canetti, Virno, Laclau, Hardt/Negri, Gago).