Department of English

This course offers a broad introduction to U.S. Latina/o/x literature, visual art, and theater. We will read poetry, short stories, novels, plays, and essays and we will examine visual art from across a wide range of mediums and traditions, including poster art, performance and video art, murals, graffiti, conceptual art, and guerrilla urban interventions. In each instance, we will study this work within its historical context and with close attention to the ways it illuminates class formation, racialization, and ideologies of gender and sexuality. Topics addressed in the course will include the historical formation of different Latina/o/x identities, revolutionary nationalism and its critique, anti-imperialist thought, feminisms, immigration, queer latinidades, ideology and racialization, and the study of literature and art within social movements. While we will address key texts, historical events, and intellectual currents from the late 19th century and early 20th century, the course will focus primarily on literature and art from the 1960s to the present. All texts will be in English.