Paper Topics | Spring 2025 | Paper 6
Due Saturday, March 15, 5:00 p.m., to your conference leader
Target length: 1,400-1,600 words
Choose one of the following topics:
- Benedict Anderson defines the nation in this way: “regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (see fuller quotation on the handout for Margot Minardi’s February 21st lecture). Choose one mural by José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, or David Alfaro Siqueiros from the gallery for Nigel Nicholson’s February 26th lecture and discuss how it imagines the Mexican nation. Based on a close formal analysis of the artwork, formulate an argument about the extent to which it reflects and/or complicates the idea of “deep, horizontal comradeship.”
- Compare how racialized categories are constructed in two different scenes from one of the following casta painting sets: 1, 2, 3. Pay particular attention to the portrayal of elements such as landscape, dress, interiors, professions, gender, and family grouping.
- Discuss how instances of guided or free syncretism (Simone Waller’s February 12th lecture) in Luis Laso de la Vega’s account of Juan Diego’s encounter with the Virgin of Guadalupe or in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s “Loa to Narcissus” reinforce or subvert colonial hierarchies of power. Explain the concept of syncretism and analyze it through close readings of your chosen text.
- In her “Letter to Sor Filotea” Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz reinterprets Saint Paul’s dictum, “Let women keep silence in the churches” (pp. 47-49). What is her understanding of these words and how does it purport to differ from standard interpretations of them? What is the larger purpose of her rereading in the context of the text as a whole?
- Luis Buñuel describes film editing in the following terms: “As in dreams, images appear and disappear through dissolves and shadows; time and space become flexible, shrinking and expanding at will; chronological order and relative lengths of time no longer correspond to reality; actions come full circle, whether they take a few minutes or several centuries; movements speed past the delays” (“Cinema as an Instrument of Poetry”, p. 139). Pick a sequence of shots from Los olvidados and explain how Buñuel’s editing choices create a particular experience of time and space. How does the narrative logic thereby conveyed contribute to the social and political content of the film?
- Focus on a sequence of testimonies in Elena Poniatowska’s Massacre in Mexico and reflect on how their form and organization serves the goal of bearing witness to the atrocities it reports?
- How is the interaction between Mexico’s past and present formulated and reimagined in either José Emilio Pacheco’s Battles in the Desert or one of the Zapatista texts? Make sure to take into account the formal aspects of the texts.