Road Trip! Mobility and Encounter in the Americas
CHUM 309
Spring 2016 not offered
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What is more U.S. American than driving? Modern American roads facilitate travels--be they migrations, meanderings, or pilgrimages--that forge connections across diverse peoples and places. How do these encounters across difference shape subjectivities and imagined communities? This is the central question of this course. As features of the landscape contoured by political institutions, economies, and cultures, roads can create among travelers a sense of belonging to the nation as citizen-subjects.But road travels can also involve cross-cultural encounters that reify difference and enforce colonial patterns of power. Stereotypes of tourists reproducing tropes of discovery and conquest come to mind. Then again, roads can offer escape, a way out of the social order, a chance, perhaps, for freedom--or something else. This course considers these tensions, with an eye toward exploring the relationship between mobility and modernity across the globalized Americas. We will engage diverse traditions of thought from popular, literary, and scholarly sources, and from both national and transnational perspectives, to understand how movements and encounters on the road remake the borders and frontiers of our hemisphere. |
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
HA CHUM |
| Course Format: Lecture | Grading Mode: Graded |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Requirement for: None |
Major Readings:
Kath Weston, TRAVELING LIGHT: ON THE ROAD WITH AMERICA'S POOR
Cotton Seiler, REPUBLIC OF DRIVERS: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF AUTOMOBILITY IN AMERICA
Bonny Bremser, TROIA: MEXICAN MEMOIRS
Seth Holmes, FRESH FRUIT, BROKEN BODIES: MIGRANT FARMWORKERS IN THE UNITED STATES
Ernesto Guevara, MOTORCYCLE DIARIES: NOTES ON A LATIN AMERICAN JOURNEY
Mayra Montero, IN THE PALM OF DARKNESS
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Examinations and Assignments:
Weekly reading responses, discussion facilitation, 2 essays |
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