Semester:
Offered:
Instructor: Jorge Sanchez Cruz
Meeting time: Thursday, 3:00-5:00 pm
How have Latinx communities been imagined and produced in U.S. popular culture, history, and literature? To answer this question, this course attends to the construction—inclusions and exclusions—of Latinidad. Paying attention to historical, juridical, discursive, and affective contributions to such construction, the course also situates performance—embodied, literary, cultural, artistic—that either affirms such assemblages or disrupts its formation. In that sense, the course explores anti-performances, refusals and disavowals of a homogenous construction that also attempt to expand if not re-construct Latinidad and the field of Latinx studies overall. To think Latinidad, then, is to grasp also into questions of race, sex, and excess that unsettle the performance and identity of Latinidad. This transdisciplinary course will study cultural productions such as films, performances, visual art and fiction within the historical contexts in which they have been produced. Assigned texts may include Glissant's Poetics of Relation (1990), Torres' We the Animals (2011), Alvarado's Abject Performances (2018), Hernández's Aesthetics of Excess (2020), and Villavicencio's The Undocumented Americans (2020).