Dr Anna Cant SAR 3.12

This course is available on the BA in History, BSc in History and Politics, BSc in International Relations and History and BSc in Politics and History. This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit and to General Course students.

From the invention of the printing press to the explosion of social media, how and with whom we communicate has had powerful consequences throughout history. This course examines the idea of the communication revolution from two perspectives. First, it looks at how inventions such as the printing press, the camera and the radio helped connect Latin Americans to national and international networks and gave rise to new political and cultural identities. Second, it investigates how individuals and groups used new communication technologies to both push for and resist revolutionary change. Examples include the role of print culture in the Atlantic Revolutions, the global impact of Cuban poster art and the pioneering use of radio education in the Andean countryside during the 1960s. The course is organised thematically around print, visual, electronic and digital communication revolutions, and extends from the colonial era to the present day. Students will be introduced to an exciting range of primary sources spanning newspapers, photographs, posters, film and sound archives, alongside secondary literature from the fields of anthropology, history, art history, and cultural studies. This course will be of particular interest to those considering careers in advertising, marketing and journalism. It will enable students to reflect critically on the relationship between the media and social change, both in Latin America and beyond.

The course has three main objectives:

1. To critically examine changes in communication systems and their impact on Latin American societies, predominantly in the post-Independence era.

2. To familiarise students with the conceptual frameworks and methodologies used to study the history of communication.

3. To enable students to develop skills in comparative history and the analysis of primary sources.

20 hours of seminars in the AT. 20 hours of seminars in the WT.

There will be a reading week in the Autumn and the Winter Terms.

One 2,000-word essay in the Autumn term. Two 10-minute presentations, one in the Autumn Term and one in the Winter Term. A discussion post (c. 300 words) each week on the Moodle discussion board.

Ades, Dawn, and Alison McClean. Revolution on Paper: Mexican Prints 1910–1960. Edited by Mark McDonald. (London: British Museum, 2009).

Bronfman, Alejandra and Andrew Grant Wood (eds), Media, Sound, and Culture in Latin America and the Caribbean (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012).

Burke, Peter, Eyewitnessing: the uses of images as historical evidence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).

Castro, Justin, Radio in Revolution: Wireless Technology and State Power in Mexico, 1897-1938 (University of Nebraska Press, 2016).

Davidson, Russ (ed.), Latin American Posters: Public Aesthetics and Mass Politics (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2006).

Geggus, David, “Print Culture and the Haitian Revolution : The Written and the Spoken Word,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 116, pt. 2 (2007): 299–314.

Ginsburg, Faye D., Lila Abu-Lughod; Brian Larkin, Media worlds: anthropology on new terrain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

Guerra, Lillian, Visions of power in Cuba: revolution, redemption, and resistance, 1959-1971 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

Katzew, Ilona, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Yale University Press, 2004).

Medina, Eden, Ivan da Costa Marques and Christina Holmes (eds.) Beyond imported magic : essays on science, technology, and society in Latin America (The MIT Press, 2014).

Nájera, Luna, ‘Contesting the Word: The Crown and the Printing Press in Colonial Spanish America’, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 89:4 (2012): 575-596.

Popkin, Jeremy D. ‘A Colonial Media Revolution: The Press in Saint-Domingue, 1789–1793,’ The Americas (Jan 2018): 3-25.

Poole, Deborah, Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (Princeton University Press, 1997).

Soriano, Cristina, Tides of Revolution: Information, Insurgencies, and the Crisis of Colonial Rule in Venezuela (University of New Mexico Press, 2018).

Zeltsman, Corinna, Ink Under the Fingernails: Printing Politics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (University of California Press, 2021).

Essay (35%, 3500 words) in the WT.
Essay (35%, 3500 words) in the ST.
Source analysis (15%) in the AT.
Class participation (15%) in the AT and WT.