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CS92PROD
Road Trip! Mobility and Encounter in the Americas
CHUM 309
Spring 2015
Section: 01  

What is more US 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 towards 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, in order to understand how movements and encounters on the road remake the borders and frontiers of our hemisphere.
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA CHUM
Course Format: LectureGrading Mode: Graded
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: None
Fulfills a Major Requirement for: None
Past Enrollment Probability: 75% - 89%

Last Updated on MAR-29-2024
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