| Hemispheric American Studies (w/C Lit 530) | Kaup | TTh 9:30-11:20 | 13145 |
Hemispheric American studies (aka trans-american studies, inter-american studies, or New World studies) is one specific instance of trans-national American studies, and it examines north-south continuities between the U.S. and Latin America and the Caribbean. Within American studies, the special urgency of Hemispheric American studies today arises from recent immigration patterns and demographics that have tied the U.S. closer to the Americas than ever before. The “hemispheric paradigm” is emerging as a serious rival to the “Atlantic paradigm” that historically has dominated American Studies, as well as hegemonic discourses of American cultural identity. Samuel Huntington's diatribe against Mexicans as unassimilable aliens in his 2004 book Who are We? Challenges to American Identity testifies to the extent to which the demographic “Hispanization” of the U.S. threatens dominant discourses of Anglo American identity. Hemispheric American Studies is nourished by (and intervenes into) two disciplines, American Studies and Latin American Studies. While we will borrow important analyses and works traditionally seen as belonging to Latin American Studies (José Martí; the de-colonial analysis of “Americanity”; Tijuana border culture), our main interest is in exploring how the hemispheric paradigm is changing (the study of) U.S. literature and culture.
We will begin by examining the ambivalence of the term “America” as a signifier for the U.S. nation as well as the entire hemisphere (the Americas), and the historical resentment on the part of Latin Americans of the U.S. appropriation of the term America to refer to itself as a nation. The symbolic erasure of Latin America from Americanness reflected in the English-language usage of the term “America” (albeit not the Spanish-language use of “América”) also epitomizes the powerful ideologies that assign the U.S. and Latin America to ontologically different spaces: the U.S. is considered a “Western” and “first world” nation; Latin America is and isn't viewed as part of so-called “Western Civilization,” and the Third World begins south of the Rio Grande.
By resituating “America” within the Americas, the advent of U.S. Latino literature and visual culture has done much to undo the U.S. appropriation of “America” and the North American master narrative of Anglo civilization and Latin American barbarism. If we re-situate the U.S. within a trans-american optic, the result is: 1) an alternative set of historical landmarks and periodization of 19th American literature in particular, rivaling the canonical division into pre- vs. post-Civil War periods. (1823, 1846-48, 1898 are landmarks of the reversal in U.S.-Latin American relations: the topos of “fraternal nations in chains throwing off the common yoke of European colonialism” was replaced by the U.S. appearance on the hemispheric scene in 1898 as a neocolonial power occupying the place vacated by Europe.) 2) alternative cultural geographies of “Américan” literature (for example, the Mexican-American borderlands from California to Texas; or the circum-Caribbean network of migrations and exchanges between New Orleans-Havana-San Juan-Florida).
Course materials will include literature and visual culture. This course will model representative approaches to the hemispheric paradigm of American Studies, beginning with a survey of the approaches of important recent book-length studies in this area, and followed by case studies of quintessential hemispheric writers, texts, and themes.
Course sections include:
• the Latin American postcolonial critique of Americanity as the cornerstone of colonial Euro-modernity: Aníbal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo;
• contemporary undocumented immigration in the U.S. and its hidden cultures: Francisco Goldman; María Helena Viramontes;
• post-1848 narratives of internal colonialism in the Mexican-American borderlands: María Amparo Ruiz de Burton; Américo Paredes;
• hemispheric continuities of the New World Baroque: popular Baroques from colonial folk Baroque cathedrals to Chicano lowriders, folk shrines and contemporary U.S. Latino/a visual art: Amalia Mesa-Bains; Rubén Ortiz Torres; and Cuban American Luis Gispert;
• José Martí, Cuban exile and author of Latino hemispheric Americanism (nuestra América [Our America]);
• hemispheric imaginaries in classic American literature: Melville;
• work from la frontera and the deterritorialization of nation-based identity: Gloria Anzaldúa; Néstor García Canclini and María Novaro on Tijuana
COURSE MATERIALS (literature, film, visual culture)
Francisco Goldman, The Ordinary Seaman (1997)
María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don (1885)
María Novaro, dir. El Jardín del Edén (1994; The Garden of Eden)
Herman Melville, “Benito Cereno”
José Martí, Writings on the Americas
Américo Paredes, The Hammon and the Beans and other Stories
Denise Sandoval, Arte y estilo: The Lowrider Tradition (English-language text)
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/la frontera: The New Mestiza
Short videos by Rubén Ortiz Torres
A COURSE READER with critical essays by Aníbal Quijano; Edmundo O’Gorman; Ramón Saldívar; Jorge Canizares-Esguerra; Diana Taylor; Tomas Ybarra-Fraustro; Carlos Fuentes; Samuel Huntingdon; Claire Fox; Kirsten Silva Gruesz; Lois Parkinson Zamora, Ramón Gutiérrez; Anna Brickhouse; Gustavo Pérez Firmat.
Assignments: one 10-15 pp. research paper on one trans-american topic, writer, or theory; mock review of a journal article; in-class presentation on one of the readings.
No knowledge of Spanish is necessary.
Texts:
