COURSES & TEACHING RESOURCES
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COURSES
Please refer to the the Hunter College, CUNY course guide for more complete information.
HUNTER COLLEGE, CUNY: Fall 2023 HUM 401 Mellon Public Humanities and Social Justice Seminar In this course, students will learn about the national initiative known as the Public Humanities, which is designed to promote advanced humanistic research that is critical to our city, our nation, and our world. Public Humanities initiatives seek to ensure that our research engages with a broader public beyond academia so that it can have a wider impact. Students will learn about the various methods used in the Public Humanities, including both learning with and from various publics as well as disseminating new knowledge more widely. Students will also learn about the connection between the Public Humanities and the pursuit of social justice, including how to define social justice and how to stage productive debates over its meaning and scope. During this Fall semester course, students will first develop and fine-tune their initial project proposal. They will also develop their independent research plan through regular meetings with their faculty mentors, graduate student mentors, program leadership, and their peers. Their research will include readings relevant to their specific project as well as possible archival research and interactions with relevant organizations and institutions in the city. They will begin early in the semester to write sections of their research paper. A complete draft of this paper will be due at the end of the first semester and is expected to be about 5000 words or about 25 pages. Students will also work closely with their faculty mentors and our program Writing Fellow on their writing. (Class Website) Spring 2023 AFPRL 356 Latinx Literatures (Writing Intensive Seminar) Latinos — people of Latin American ancestry living in the United States — are often represented as a recent historical intrusion even though Latino forms of personhood and cultural production both predate and are continuous with the consolidation of the US’s geopolitical borders and spheres of influence. Despite this history of participation and presence, a haunting absence overwhelms the literary, cultural, and historical landscapes of the nation that cannot account for the Latino body politic or explain why the nation’s largest “majority-minority” — currently at over 60 million — is also the most politically disenfranchised. How have Latino literary and visual technologies of representation attempted to account for this historical erasure? How are the categories of sexual, racial, linguistic, and ethnic difference negotiated in the construction of the U.S. Latino body politic? In this course we will analyze how Latino literature and identity projects have attempted to engage these questions and the politics of national belonging by insisting that the Latino body is 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, resisted or demanded cultural inclusion. Primary texts across genres and major literary movements will be complemented by theoretical and interdisciplinary examples from the broader tradition of Latino and African American literature and performance. (This course is both reading and writing intensive and fulfills the Hunter College “Diversity and Pluralism B” requirement.) (Class Website) AFPRL 290 and ARTH 299: Black and Latinx Art "Black and Latinx art" refers to the expressive practices and artistic production of peoples of African American and Latin American descent in the U.S. This course asks fundamental questions related to Black and Latinx aesthetic production, its relation to the history of art in the U.S., as well as curatorial and museum practice. Among these: What constitutes Black and Latinx aesthetic expression? How has the discipline of art history understood Black and Latinx artistic expression in the U.S.? How have Black and Latinx identified artists and cultural agents engaged with and responded to cultural, historical, and institutional erasures? In order to grapple with these questions, and many others, we will read about and analyze the work of Black and Latinx artists from the nineteenth century to the present in order to develop interpretive methods that can account for the artistic, historical, cultural, and political blind spots that have shaped art historical discourse. Interactive lectures will cover a range of material culture, including the built environment, ephemera, film, installations, painting, performance, photography, and sculpture. The course pays particular attention to themes related to Black and Latinx life and their connectedness to “American” history including migration, citizenship, social segregation, expatriation, gender norms, and the experience of racism, among many other topics. The course is interdisciplinary in nature and will include interpretive methodologies and theoretical frames from art history, literary studies, anthropology, ethnomusicology, geography, history, and performance studies. We will use both primary and secondary sources to gain an understanding of the Black and Latinx experience as depicted through various art forms; the course readings will be coupled with music, poetry, and narratives. (Course Website) Fall 2022 Course Description Macaulay Honors College. Seminar 1: Arts in NYC "Arts in NYC” introduces first-year Macaulay Honors College (MHC) students to a wide range of arts programming in New York City that includes the plastic arts, photography, theater, narrative, film, music, opera, and dance. The course defines “the arts” as a wide array of expressive practices that span artistic genres and related forms of cultural production and aesthetic expression in historical and political context. This section of “Arts in NYC” puts in conversation an array of expressive practices organized around Black and Latinx responses to art historical cannon formation and its relation to race, gender, sexuality, national values, and the political economies of aesthetic value. Throughout the semester we will attend exhibitions, performances, and events that ask us to attend to the Black and Latinx aesthetic sensorium. How do the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures of Black and Latinx life find aesthetic expression in a national culture that devalues Black and Latinx life? This central animating question will be explored alongside the methodological and theoretical armature of decolonial art historiography, Critical Race Theory (CRT), and philosophical critiques of colorismo and “scaler” human value. In the process, we will consider the forms of being, knowing, interpreting, and freedom that open up to us when we are attuned the Black and Latinx sensorium. Beyond analyzing and interpreting the formal properties of the works assembled and curated in this course—such as visual versus narrative interpretation, framing, perspective, genre, tone, disposition, and more—we will endeavor to understand how the interplay between Black and Latinx specific forms of representation and aesthetic pleasure can help instantiate practices of freedom that bring us closer to historical redress, epistemic repair, and a more just democratic commons. (Class website) AFPRL 290 Latinx Expressive Practices In this course we will analyze how Latinx literary cultures and expressive practices have attempted to engage the politics of national belonging. Despite being represented as a recent historical intrusion into the geographic fold of the country, Latinx 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 Latinx body or explain why the nation’s largest “minority” is also the most politically disenfranchised. How have Latinx 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 the U.S. Latinx body politic? In this course we will analyze how Latino literary cultures and expressive practices 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. (Course Website) Spring 2022 AFPRL 356 Latino Literatures (Writing Intensive Seminar) Latinos — people of Latin American ancestry living in the United States — are often represented as a recent historical intrusion even though Latino forms of personhood and cultural production both predate and are continuous with the consolidation of the US’s geopolitical borders and spheres of influence. Despite this history of participation and presence, a haunting absence overwhelms the literary, cultural, and historical landscapes of the nation that cannot account for the Latino body politic or explain why the nation’s largest “majority-minority” — currently at over 60 million — is also the most politically disenfranchised. How have Latino literary and visual technologies of representation attempted to account for this historical erasure? How are the categories of sexual, racial, linguistic, and ethnic difference negotiated in the construction of the U.S. Latino body politic? In this course we will analyze how Latino literature and identity projects have attempted to engage these questions and the politics of national belonging by insisting that the Latino body is 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, resisted or demanded cultural inclusion. Primary texts across genres and major literary movements will be complemented by theoretical and interdisciplinary examples from the broader tradition of Latino and African American literature and performance. (This course is both reading and writing intensive and fulfills the Hunter College “Diversity and Pluralism B” requirement.) (Class Website) AFPRL 260 Latinos and Citizenship This course examines the politics of Latino national and cultural belonging in the U.S. through the historical, cultural, political and legal category of “citizenship.” Historically, the distinctive core of citizenship has been the possession of formal status and membership in a political and legal entity, as well as having particular rights and obligations within it. This core understanding of citizenship goes back to classical antiquity and coalesced around two broad understandings of citizenship stemming from ancient Greece and Imperial Rome that later evolved into what came to be termed the “republican” and “liberal” accounts of citizenship. In this course we will analyze and critique the function and limits of citizenship in the U.S. as it relates to the country’s largest “minority-majority: Latinos. The course begins with an overview of the category of citizenship before considering how constrictive notions of citizenship in the U.S. have attempted to delimit Latino civic life and freedoms from the end of U.S. – Mexico War (1848) to the present. The course then analyzes how various Latino groups have attained citizenship, as well as how others have been stripped of theirs, and how Latinos have creatively responded to limits imposed on their freedoms and entry into “American” civic life. After examining the foundations of U.S. citizenship for Latinos, the course will engage current debates regarding Latinos and citizenship including: the separation of immigrant children from their families; the Latino immigration rights movement and the U.S. civil rights movement; the DREAM Act; the concept of Latino “cultural citizenship”; the rise in deportations and their effect on the lives of citizens and cultural citizens alike; access to education and health care in the age of Covid-19; and the racial profiling of Latinos as instantiated by law. Upon successful completion of the course students will be able to answer the following questions: What are the criteria for determining who is a citizen and how has that impacted Latinos? Why has U.S. citizenship been variously imagined as determined by birth, blood, territory, marriage, or petition except when it intersects with the categories of race and linguistic difference? Does being a citizen require doing certain things? And, more broadly, How do gender, race, ethnic, and sexual identity intersect with prescriptive notions of citizenship? (Class Website) Fall 2021 AFPRL 290 and ARTH 299: Black and Latinx Art “When we think about aesthetics we associate its meaning with beauty or taste, but ‘aesthetic’ comes from ‘making aware’ — just the opposite of doctors anesthetizing their patients, artists aestheticize.” —Teresita Fernández Black and Latinx aesthetic expression refers to the artistic production of peoples of African American and Latin American descent in the U.S. This course asks fundamental questions related to Black and Latinx aesthetic production, its relation to the history of art in the U.S., as well as curatorial and museum practice. Among these: What constitutes Black and Latinx aesthetic expression? How has the discipline of art history understood Black and Latinx artistic expression in the U.S.? How have Black and Latinx identified artists and cultural agents engaged with and responded to cultural, historical, and institutional erasures? In order to grapple with these questions, and many others, we will read about and analyze the work of Black and Latinx artists from the nineteenth century to the present in order to develop interpretive methods that can account for the artistic, historical, cultural, and political blind spots that have shaped art historical discourse. Interactive lectures will cover a range of material culture, including the built environment, ephemera, film, installations, painting, performance, photography, and sculpture. The course pays particular attention to themes related to Black and Latinx life and their connectedness to “American” history including migration, citizenship, social segregation, expatriation, gender norms, and the experience of racism, among many other topics. The course is interdisciplinary in nature and will include interpretive methodologies and theoretical frames from art history, literary studies, anthropology, ethnomusicology, geography, history, and performance studies. We will use both primary and secondary sources to gain an understanding of the Black and Latinx experience as depicted through various art forms; the course readings will be coupled with music, poetry, and narratives. (Course Website) AFPRL 390 and POLSC 317: This course explores how Latinos—people of Latin American ancestry living in the US—have transformed “deliberative democracy” and democratic practice. In an “America” that has been demographically and culturally transformed by Latinos at a moment of unprecedented historical crisis and state failures, this course asks: What do citizens, cultural citizens, and their democratically elected representatives owe each other for the laws they enact and the social contract that binds them? Informed by critical race theory, the Black Lives Matter Movement (#BLM), curatorial arts practice, literature, and the critique of Covid-19 related state failures, this course examines how Latinos have creatively engaged the politics of national belonging. We will develop a critical understanding of the history of Latinos in relation to the construction of group-based identities in democratic systems, the relationship between Latino history and the spaces of democratic emergence, historical inequalities and power relations between “minority” groups in the U.S., and the divergent interpretations of who counts as an “American” and the conditions under which such “political emergence” can happen. (Course Website) Spring 2021 AFPRL 356: Latino Literatures Latinos 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 literary cultures 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. (Course Website) AFPRL 260: Latinos and Citizenship This course examines the politics of Latino national and cultural belonging in the U.S. through the historical and political category of “citizenship.” Historically, the distinctive core of citizenship has been the possession of formal status and membership in a political and legal entity, as well as having particular rights and obligations within it. This core understanding of citizenship goes back to classical antiquity and coalesced around two broad understandings of citizenship stemming from ancient Greece and Imperial Rome that later evolved into what came to be termed the “republican” and “liberal” accounts of citizenship. In this course we will analyze and critique the function and limits of citizenship in the U.S. as it relates to the country’s largest “minority-majority: Latinos. The course begins with an overview of the category of citizenship before considering how constrictive notions of citizenship in the U.S. have attempted to delimit Latino civic life and freedoms from the end of U.S. – Mexico War (1848) to the present. The course then analyzes how various Latino groups have attained citizenship, as well as how others have been stripped of theirs, and how Latinos have creatively responded to limits imposed on their freedoms and entry into “American” civic life. After examining the foundations of U.S. citizenship for Latinos, the course will engage current debates regarding Latinos and citizenship including: the separation of immigrant children from their families; the Latino immigration rights movement and the U.S. civil rights movement; the DREAM Act; the concept of Latino “cultural citizenship”; the rise in deportations and their effect on the lives of citizens and cultural citizens alike; access to education and health care in the age of Covid-19; and the racial profiling of Latinos as instantiated by law. (Class Website) AFPRL 390 / POLSC 317 Being Brown: Latinos in US Political Culture Latinos, people of Latin American ancestry living in the United States, are the largest national “minority” at nearly 60 million strong yet they remain the most underrepresented in the nation’s circuits of power and institutions. We will explore why this is so, who has benefited from the disappearance of the Latino body from the national body politic (especially when at war or behind bars), and what we stand to gain by understanding how Latino political cultures can fortify democratic practice. AFPRL 102: Latino Communities in the US Migration, ethnicity, community life, and public policy issues affecting Latino groups groups in the U.S. Course serves as an introduction to the field of Latino/Puerto Rican studies. (Course Website) AFPRL 104: Intro to Puerto Rican and Latino Studies This course provides an introduction to Puerto Rican and Latino Studies through a representative sample of curated themes and topics. Latinos, people of Latin American ancestry living in the United States, are the largest national “minority” at over 57.5 million strong yet they remain most underrepresented in the nation’s circuits of power and institutions, save for the military and the prison industrial complex. We will explore why this is so, who has benefited from the disappearance of the Latino body from the national body politic (especially when at war), and what we stand to gain by asking P.R. and Latino cultural agents, workers, and artifacts to “speak” for themselves. Our archive will consist primarily of historical, cultural, political, digital, archival and performative sources and our methodological grounding will be transdisciplinary and intersectional. Consequently, what we do, and the course itself, is part of a broader archive that is unfolding about the nature of P.R. and Latino knowledge production in universities regarding the democratic commons at premiere public liberal arts institutions — such as Hunter College — that attempt to decolonize the curriculum. (Course Website) UNIVERSITY OF RICHMOND: Latin American and Latino Studies Symposium Mellon Tocqueville American Studies Seminars AMST 391: This community-based learning Andrew W. Mellon Foundation “Tocqueville American Studies Seminar” explores the question of “deliberative democracy” in an America that has been demographically and culturally transformed by Latinos and asks, What do citizens, cultural citizens, and their democratically elected representatives owe each other for the laws they enact and the social contract that binds them? Informed by critical race theory, performance studies, curatorial arts practice, and literature, this course examines how Latinos have creatively engaged the politics of national belonging. We will develop a critical understanding of the history of Latinos in relation to the construction of group-based identities in democratic systems, the relationship between Latino history and the spaces of democratic emergence, historical inequalities and power relations between “minority” groups in the U.S., and the divergent interpretations of who counts as an “American” and the conditions under which such “political emergence” can happen. Class Media Blog. LALIS/AMST 486. U.S. Latino Literatures and Cultures. Latinos 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 minor/major. Class Media Blog. LALIS 332. Introduction to Spanish American Literature II. This course surveys the emergence of Spanish American 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, TCI method, and rhetorical and literary criticism. Counts toward American Studies major. NEW Class Media Blog (Old Class Media Blog). LALIS 486/AMST 398. 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. Class Media Blog. LALIS 398/AMST 477. Sugar's Secrets/Caribbean Literary and Cultural Studies. This course examines Caribbean literary and cultural production in translation from the early colonial chronicles of exploration to contemporary memoir, performance art, and film. 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 emancipation. Prerequisites: LAIS 321, 331, or 332 (and/or professor's permission). Counts toward American Studies major and with, C-LAC designation, toward the LAIS major. Class Media Blog. AMST 398-01. U.S. Latino Literary and Cultural Archives. This seminar curates, showcases, and analyzes a representative archive of U.S. Latino and Latina cultural artifacts. Latinos, people of Latin American ancestry living in the United States, are the largest national "minority" yet the most underrepresented in the nation's circuits of power and institutions, save for the military and the prison industrial complex. We will explore why this is so, who has benefited from the disappearance of the Latino body from the national body politic (especially when at war or behind bars), and what we stand to gain by asking Latino cultural workers and artifacts to "speak" for themselves. In the process, we will attempt to propose Latino-specific methodologies for doing and inhabiting cultural analysis from the legal concept of "res ipsa loquitur" ("the thing speaks for itself"); a theory for analyzing injury or cultural grievance in democratic systems based on "outcomes" (evidence of injury) and not "intent" (the ostensible will of democratic institutions). Our archive will consist primarily of literary texts since these artifacts have been the most fetishized in the history of trans-American canon formation. (Indeed, next to coins, the most important artifacts that are left to us in the West are books which have been traditionally deemed to be animated with the judgement of their "makers" who ostensibly have something significant to bequeath.) Additionally, we will analyze recent attempts at documenting the aesthetics and politics of Latino belonging (citizenship and cultural citizenship) and "unbecoming" (deportation/exile/necrocitizenship) through Web 2.0 and digital media, with considerable emphasis on Latino film, sonic memorials and experiments, video games, fanzines, Latino zombies (The Walking Dead AMC series) and related parodies (Hey Vato! Zombies in the Hood and Juan of the Dead), west-coast hip-hop, counter-border patrol performances, and contemporary cultural production by US Latino performers and cultural provocateurs. Counts toward American Studies major and with, C-LAC designation, toward the LAIS major. Class Media Blog LALIS 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, TCI method, and rhetorical and literary criticism. Counts toward American Studies major. NEW Class Media Blog (Old Class Media Blog). LALIS 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, TCI method, and rhetorical and literary criticism. Counts toward American Studies major. Class Media Blog LALIS 302. Spanish through Fiction and Film. Literature and film course conducted in Spanish. The course will develop advance Spanish linguistic skills through reading, writing, conversation and composition. (Does not count toward FSLT University requirement.) Class Media Blog Supersite 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. |
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