Introduction to Latina/o/x Literature and Art: Border, Citizen, Body
ENGL 279
Spring 2018 not offered
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| Course Cluster: 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? |
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
HA ENGL |
| Course Format: Lecture / Discussion | Grading Mode: Graded |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Requirement for: (AMST)(ENGL)(ENGL-Literature) |
Major Readings:
Literature that may be featured in the course: The Masses are Asses (Pedro Pietri 1974); Nuyorican Poetry; ...y no se lo tragó la tierra/And the Earth Did Not Devour Him (Tomás Rivera; *trans. Evangelina Vigil-Piñon*, 1971); Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (Richard Rodriguez, 1992); Drown (Junot Díaz, 1997).
Visual, film and performance artists who may be featured in the course: Enrique Chagoya, Julio Cesar Morales, Ester Hernández, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Miguel Luciano, Félix González Torres, Asco, Carmelita Tropicana, Coco Fusco, Nao Bustamante, Guillermo Gómez Peña, León Ichaso, John Leguizamo.
Criticism and theory by Mae Ngai, José E. Muñoz, David Román, Fred Moten, Antonio Viego, Suzanne Oboler, Gloria Anzaldúa, Miguel Algarín, Judith Butler, Lisa Marie Cacho, Sianne Ngai, Juan Flores, Gayatri Spivak, Jacques Derrida, Lauren Berlant, Ondine Chavoya, and Alexander Weheliye may be paired with select readings and viewings.
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Examinations and Assignments:
Attendance, 2 short papers (3-4 pages), peer-editing/intervention exercise, and a final research paper (8-10 pages)
Attending performances and screenings and doing live/embodied research on and potentially off campus will be required in this course. |
Additional Requirements and/or Comments:
This course fulfills the Literatures of Difference requirement and contributes to the Race and Ethnicity concentration in the English major. It also helps satisfy the Comparative Americas requirement for American Studies majors. |
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