Special Topics in Latino/a Studies in the Global South

LSGS 390S

Latinx Literary Worlds  LSGS 390S.02

This seminar will think at the border of contemporary movements and ongoing crises surrounding migration, colonization, and environmental racism as we read Latinx literature and encounter Latinx art. We will consider how Latinx writers from the United States, as well as the broader hemisphere, bear witness to historical movements built of dreams and resistance—border crossings lived and the crossing of borders over lives. So too will we pay attention to the fraught fault lines of race, class, language, and gender that put pressure on the word Latinx. Questions, rather than answers, will guide the seminar.

Where does the term Latinx come from? What stories, bodies, and worlds are built into its etymology that operates as a hope, a threat, and a long, variegated story? How does latinidad encompass contradiction and reverberate differently across space and time? Whom does the term serve? Whom does it eclipse? And how can the voices of writers and artists tell us a story that unsettles the terms under which we receive it? What can art and literature tell us about latinidad that cannot rendered in contemporary media headlines? How can ongoing and overlapping crisis give us direction on how we might begin to read these stories—this hemispheric archive of so much narrative, poetry, art, and movement?

TTH 11:45-1:00

A comparative and interdisciplinary approach to Latino/a Studies in the Global South. Topics vary by semester and instructors.
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Typically Offered
Occasionally