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CS92PROD
Introduction to Latina/o/x Literature and Art: Border, Citizen, Body

ENGL 279
Fall 2020 not offered
Course Cluster and Certificates: Caribbean Studies Minor

This course will engage Latina/o aesthetics to think about borders, desire, citizenship, personhood, and embodiment. By engaging the Latina/o artistic imaginary, we will consider the emergence of contradictory social phenomena, such as dreamers, assimilative drives, utopic desires for anti-assimilative places of habitation, the minuteman militia, consumer drives for representations of "spicy" and "exotic" and "degenerate" brown bodies, reclamations by Latina/o artists of brownness, spiciness and degeneracy, as well as laws in Arizona, Texas, and California that endow police with the power to discern visually whether a brown body is "legal" or not. Several questions and themes will focus our engagements of literature, cinema, and music: How does the Latina/o artistic imaginary depict distinct migrant journeys and rural or urban forms of labor? How do intersecting discussions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class in relation to Latina/o aesthetics complicate the existing definitions of these terms in the United States? How do artists interrogate heteronormativity in Latina/o and dominant U.S. cultures? How do they conceive of their specific crises of representation, which include the demand for realism and personal narratives by critics and mainstream readers? What deviant and beautiful forms of life does Latina/o aesthetics make imaginable for everyone?
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA ENGL
Course Format: LectureGrading Mode: Graded
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: None
Fulfills a Major Requirement for: (AMST)(ENGL)(ENGL-Literature)

Last Updated on MAR-28-2024
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