LALS 230 - Latina and Latino Literature

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

(Same as ENGL 230) Students and instructor collaborate to identify and dialogue with the growing but still disputed archive of Latine or Latinx Literature. The categories ”Latine,” ”Latinx,” and “Latina/o” present us then with our first challenge: exactly what demographics do these categories isolate (or create)? How do they differ from the categories “Hispanic,” “Chicanx,” “Raza,” “Mestizx,” or “Boricua,” to name only a few alternatives, and how should these differences inform our critical reading practices? When and where does Latine/x literature originate? Together, we work to identify what formal and thematic continuities might characterize a Latine/x literary heritage. Some of those commonalities include border crossing or displacement, the tension between political and cultural citizenship, code-switching, indigeneity, contested and/or shifting racial formations, queer sexualities, gender politics, discourses of hybridity, generational conflict, and an ambivalent sense of loss (differently articulated as trauma, nostalgia, forgetting, mourning, nationalism, or assimilation). Hiram Perez.

This course fulfills the REGS requirement for the English major.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS