Department of English

This course offers a broad introduction to the study of U.S. Latinx literature, culture, and history. We will read poetry, short stories, manifestoes, testimonios, plays, novels, and essays, and examine poster art, murals, and performance art. 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 as they shape Latino/a/xs’ experience in the U.S. Topics addressed in the course include labor, state violence, racism, revolutionary nationalism and internationalism, multiracial feminism, immigration, queer kinship and sexuality, U.S. imperialism, and the study of literature and visual art as they relate to social movements. While we will address historical events and intellectual currents from the 19th and early 20th centuries, the course will focus primarily on the period from the 1960s to the present. Students will have the opportunity to develop their own creative project as part of the course assignments.