This course examines intersections of artistic production and radical politics in the 20th and 21st centuries with an emphasis on the relationship between expressive culture and political and social movements in the Americas. It offers a selective review of important 20th and 21st theories and debates about the transformative power of culture and the relationship between aesthetics and politics, giving particular attention to the way these theories are informed by questions of race, class, nation, empire, and gender. We will review examples of ways artists have contributed to progressive and radical politics since the 1920s, including in revolutionary movements and new social movements. These include examples from across the U.S., Mexico, the U.S./Mexico border region, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia and Guatemala. We will discuss literature, visual art, theater, film and video, performance art, street art, urban interventions, tactical media, and extradisciplinary art practices. This course models an interdisciplinary methodology for analyzing expressive practices within their historical and social contexts. In addition to analyzing primary texts, we will read critics and theorists working in the fields of performance and literary studies, aesthetic and social theory, cultural studies, film studies, social movement theory, and urban studies. Through its focus on the relationship between art and politics this course also introduces students to important theories and concepts related to the study of the relationship between culture and power more broadly. Key writers and theorists addressed in this course include Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Mikhail Bakhtin, Louis Althusser, Arturo Escobar, Edward McCaughan, Raúl Homero Villa, Pablo Freire, Augusto Boal, Diana Taylor, Stuart Hall, Grant Kester, Fredric Jameson, Geert Lovink, Maristella Svampa, Raúl Zibechi, Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, Greg Grandin, Jean Franco, Luis Camnitzer, Randall Williams, Ramón Saldivar, Patrica Galvão (Pagu), Aimé Cesaire, Domitila Barrios de Chúngara, Janet Wolff. Visual artists include CADA, Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez Peña, Iconoclasistas, Yolanda López, Etcétera... and the Internacional Errorista, Santiago Sierra, Tania Bruguera, Los Grupos, Fran Ilich, Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC), El Siluetazo, Ricardo Dominguez and Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0, Asco, Robert Legoretta (Cyclona), the Rosario Group, los Tres Grandes. Playwrights include Enrique Buenaventura, Griselda Gámbaro, Luis Valdez and El Teatro Campesino, Pedro Pietri, Ariel Dorfman, Cherríe Moraga. We will study between 5-8 films selected from work by the following filmmakers: Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, Jorge Sanjinés, Julio García Espinosa, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Glauber Rocha, Alex Rivera, Julián D?Angiolillo, Ken Loach, Natalia Almada, Sergio Arau, Gregory Nava, Humberto Solás, Frente 3 de Fevereiro.