(Please refer to the the University Catalog for complete information.)


UNIVERSITY OF RICHMOND:
LAIS/AMST 486. U.S. Latino Literatures and Cultures.
Latinos—people of Latin American ancestry living in the United States—are often represented as a recent historical intrusion into the geographic fold of the country even though Latino forms of personhood and cultural production both predate and are coterminous with the consolidation of the country’s geopolitical borders and spheres of influence. Despite this history of participation and presence, a haunting absence overwhelms the literary, cultural, and affective landscapes of the nation that cannot account for the Latino body or explain why the nation’s largest “minority” is also the most politically disenfranchised. How have Latino literary and visual technologies of representation attempted to account for this historical elision? How are the categories of sexual, racial, linguistic, and ethnic difference negotiated in the construction of (anti)essentialist renderings of the U.S. Latino body politic? In this course we will analyze how Latino identity projects have attempted to engage these questions and the politics of national belonging by positing the Latino body as a constitutive subject of American cultural history from the U.S.-Mexican War (1846-48) to the present. In the process, we will study and critique the conditions under which Latino texts and bodies have been granted, denied, or resisted cultural inclusion. Primary texts across genres and major literary movements by Chicano, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Central American and Cuban American writers will be complemented by theoretical and interdisciplinary examples from the broader tradition of Latino, African American, and Asian American anti-hegemonic writing. Principal methods of analysis will include Ethnic American Studies research methods, symbolic system analysis, guided explicación de texto, and rhetorical and literary criticism. Prerequisites: LAIS 321, 331, or 332 (and/or professor's permission). Counts toward American Studies major and LAIS major. Course Media Blog

LAIS 332. Introduction to Spanish American Literature II.

This course surveys the emergence of Spanish American national literary culture from the late XIX century ("Modernismo") to the emergence of transnational and inter-American literary projects ("Generation Crack"). Representative texts from art history, film, and architecture studies will complement primary literary texts. Principal methods of analysis will include symbolic system analysis, guided explicación de texto, and rhetorical and literary criticism. Counts toward American Studies major. Class Media Blog

LAIS 331. Introduction to Spanish American Literature I

This course surveys the cultural, historical and literary contexts of the Iberian colonization of the Americas from the early Spanish transcriptions of indigenous writing systems to the late XIX century emergence of criollo subjectivity in the "Lettered City" (Ángel Rama). Representative texts from art history, archeology, and architecture studies will complement primary (proto)literary texts from the Pre-Columbian period to early Modernismo. Principal methods of analysis will include symbolic system analysis, guided explicación de texto, and rhetorical and literary criticism. Counts toward American Studies major. Class Media Blog


BRYN WAWR COLLEGE:
331. Trans Nation: Transnational Subjects and Queer Futurity

This course engages the current vanguard of U.S. Latino, Latin American, and Anglo-American debates about state formation in the construction of citizenship from the perspective of transgender and queer studies. We will explore recent theoretical and cultural works that challenge normative understandings of gender, sexuality, ethnic identity, nationalism, state-formation, and the body in order to instantiate a politics of "Queer futurity" free of normative ideations of citizenship and civic belonging. In the process, the course will analyze the limits of cultural and theoretical interface between U.S. Latino, Latin American, and Anglo-American cultural theory. Prerequisites: ENGL B250, SPAN 202 or equivalent. Course taught in English. Enrollment limited to 20. Counts toward Gender & Sexuality concentration. Counts toward Hispanic Studies Concentration. Class Media Blog

329. Brown Affect:  Narrating Latina and Latino Lives

This course studies the construction of Latino lives in and through autobiographies and autobiographical fiction in the context of the civil rights movement and the ensuing rise of Latino nationalism. The course studies the Latino subversion of autobiography as a genre from its belletristic associations with the bildungsroman to its more recent manifestations borne of inter-American and European (post)modernist traditions, as well as Latino autobiography's more culturally specific grounding in the Latin American crónica. We will study how writing about "feeling brown" has made Latino life-writing a literary as well as a political act of self-creation in the work of Lolita Lebrón, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Susana Chávez-Silverman, Esmeralda Santiago, Rosario Ferré, Sonia Rivera, Irene Vilar, Reinaldo Arenas, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Richard Rodríguez and others. Prerequisite: ENGL B250, SPAN B220, or equivalent. (Division III)

327. The Latino Novel in the Age of Globalization

Latino literature, writing by persons of Latin American ancestry in the United States, could be said to be emblematic of cultural globalization. Latino writing, most often construed as a "minority" literature and presumably written in English, garners the most attention when it exhibits "third-symbologies"; that is, the clichéd literary and cultural symbolism that panders to capitalist consumer niches by exalting its "minority" status. Indeed, the terms used to describe this type of cultural production  ("Chicano," "Latino," "Hispanic," etc.) establish an identifiable commodity, a niche for cultural consumption that is often conflated with Latin American literatures and cultures writ large. Given the theoretical and methodological challenges generated by Latino literature and cultural production in the age of transnational globalization, this course seeks to study the implications that this phenomenon lays bare in relation to the assumptions that undergird the study of national literatures determined by geography and the nation-state. Prerequisite: ENGL B250, SPAN B220, or equivalent. (Division III) Class Media Blog

310. The Postmortem Aesthetic: Peripheral (Post)Modernity in Mexican Narrative and Cultural Production

This course studies the "pedagogies" of Mexican nationalism:  the ways in which the nation was represented by the culture industry in order to instruct citizens and cultural agents at large about desired and profitable conceptions of national identity and proper (as well as deviant) forms of civic personhood. Focusing specifically on novels, poetry and film, the course further concentrates on the figuration of "death" in Mexican culture as a critique of Modernity and as one of Mexico’s principle symbols of cultural identity. We will pay particular attention to the counter revolutionary movements of the 60’s, and the rise of the "Postmortem aesthetic" as a response to Neoliberal reform and the globalization of Mexican cultural identity into what anthropologists and cultural critics have begun to understand as a borderless state or, more succinctly, "Greater Mexico." Prerequisite: ENGL B250, SPAN B220, or equivalent. (Division III) Class Media Blog

ENGLISH 270.401 (University of Pennsylvania): The Latina/o Body in American Literary and Cultural Memory

The Latino body is often represented as a recent historical intrusion into the geographic fold of the United States even though Latino forms of personhood and cultural production both predate and are coterminous with the consolidation of the country's geopolitical borders and spheres of influence. Despite this history of participation and presence, a haunting absence overwhelms the historical, cultural, and affective landscapers of the nation that cannot account for the Latino body or explain why the country's largest "minority" is also the most politically disenfranchised. How have Latino literary and visual technologies of representation attempted to account for this historical elision? How are the categories of sexual, racial, linguistic, and ethnic difference negotiated in the construction of (anti)essentialist renderings of the Latino body politic? In this course we will analyze how Latino identity projects have attempted to engage these questions and the politics of national belonging by positing the Latino body as a constitutive subject of American cultural history from the U.S.-Mexico War (1846-48) to the present. In the process, we will study and critique the conditions under which Latino texts and bodies have been granted, denied, or resisted cultural inclusion. Primary texts across genres and literary movements by Chicano, Boricua, Dominican, Cuban American, and Central American writers will be complemented by theoretical and interdisciplinary examples from the broader tradition of Latino, African American, and Asian American anti-hegemonic writing. Class Media Blog

227. Latino Literary Genealogies

This course examines the emancipatory and, sometimes, collusive appropriation of "American" literature by Latinos. The course begins with a genealogical survey of Latino writing and cultural production from the nineteenth century to the present in order to contextualize the eventual rise of Latino ethnic particularisms of sixties. We will analyze how Latinos, often living inside two languages and cultures, inflect the national landscape by erasing both literal and linguistic "American" borders in a country made up largely of immigrants. Prerequisite: ENGL B250, SPAN B220, or equivalent. (Division III) Class Media Blog

218. Border Films and Narratives

Cultural production charting border crossings, or immigration narratives in literature and film, depend on a series of presuppositions in order to make their objects knowable. How we view Latin American and U.S. Latino immigration and migration cannot help but be affected by how it has been projected in film and rendered through literature. In this class we will study the literary and filmic production about border crossing and (im)migration and how these have shaped debates about the nature of national affiliation for the country’s largest U.S. Latino “minority” and the Latin American and U.S. borders these groups transgress. This course will also examine the enduring stereotypes about border-crossers that appear in mainstream media productions and contemporary literature, and how Latino and Latin-American filmakers have attempted to subvert these images by presenting a more complex set representations and experiences about border-crossers. Prerequisite: ENGL B250, SPAN B220, or equivalent. (Division III) Class Media Blog

215. "Black Memory": Afro-Hispanic Literatures

This course examines literary expression of the African diaspora written across national literary cultures through what cultural and literary theorists have called “The Black Atlantic” condition. The course analyzes how the category of “race” becomes a floating signifier across literary traditions that emerge after the European colonization of both Africa and the Americas. In doing so, the category and temporal marker for “literary modernism” is questioned from an array of subject positions and across literary cultures (e.g., Hispano-Caribbean negrismo vs. French and Francophone négritude, Harlem Renaissance vs. africanismo internacional, etc.) in order to investigate what it means to instantiate a “Black aesthetic.” Prerequisite: ENGL B250, SPAN B220, or equivalent. (Division III)

214. Caribbean Encounters

This course examines Hispanic Caribbean literary and cultural production from the early colonial chronicles of exploration to contemporary performance artists. By studying pivotal moments in Caribbean literary and cultural history we will engage the "New World's" first multicultural center through the analysis of its complex legacies: racism, slavery, mestizaje, empire building and its dissolution, and emancipation. Prerequisite: SPAN B200, B202, or any 200-level Spanish course, placement of permission. (Division III)
Class Media Blog

200. Spanish American and Spanish Cultural Studies

An introduction to the history and cultures of the Spanish-speaking world in a global context: art, folklore, geography, literature, sociopolitical issues and multicultural perspectives. Prerequisite: Spanish 102 or 105, or placement. Class Media Blog

100. Imagina

000. Faculty Innovation Fund Faculty Seminar on Theory