Department of English

Butterflies and hurricanes pay no heed to borders, but humans will risk their lives to cross them, build walls to mark them, and kill to defend them. In this writing workshop, we will explore our own relations to borders across a variety of genres. At a moment when the number of displaced persons is projected to rise steeply over the next 30 years, we cannot escape questions of borders and identities in our writing. How do our heritage(s) as citizen, resident, explorer, refugee, immigrant, tourist, trader, slave or raider condition the present and future of writing? How do race, class, and gender enter in? We will examine recent texts that explore these questions as well as look to the future. Authors may include Caroline Bergvall, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Maxine Hong Kingston, Aimé Césaire, C. S. Giscombe, Habib Tengour, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as well as theoretical texts by Césaire, Pierre Joris, Benedict Anderson and Claude Levi-Strauss. Students should expect to keep journals and produce several works in different genres that we will go over closely in class.