This course examines contemporary and historical works by U.S. Latino authors and the critical debates that their emergence within American literature has spurred since the 1960s. We will consider the key issues and themes, critical methods and approaches, and historical and cultural conditions through which Latino literature has asserted its difference within U.S. literature, transforming the overall structure of American literary history. Americans have historically been oblivious to the fact that the U.S. is part of an entire hemisphere also named “America.” The advent of Latino Literature has undone this imperial appropriation of “America” by the U.S. by re-situating “America” within the Americas. If we view the U.S. as part of the Americas, the result is 1) an alternative set of historical landmarks and periodization of 19th-century American literature: 1823, 1846-48, 1898, and 2) alternative cultural geographies of “Am(é)rican” literature: for example, the circum-Caribbean network of migrations and transmissions between New Orleans-Havana-San Juan-Florida, and the reconfiguration of “the Southwest” as el norte, the northward destination of Mexican migrations.

In addition to mapping alternative geographies and periodizations (such as rewritings of 19th century and modernist literary history), we will pose a number of critical questions:
What is an appropriate critical methodology for framing U.S. Latino literature? What are the stakes of using the ethnic studies and minority literature models underlying, for example, the “Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage” project, a vast archival effort to recover and publish the literary voices of historical Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Cuban-American communities? What, on the other hand, are the advantages and limits of truly transnational methods of analysis, such as comparative literature? (Some works published in the U.S. by Latin American exiles cannot be read as “precursors” of contemporary Latino literature.) Is there an American literature written in Spanish? (Bilingual poetry makes the case in favor.) How does Latino literature relate to other U.S. minority and working class literatures, via genres such as ethnic autobiography, the Chicano folk corrido, Chicano teatro campesino and the migrant worker novel? How has Latino literature reconfigured the literary types of native, immigrant, and exile literature? What new genres (i.e. the modernist chronicle, magical realism) have been introduced by Latino writers? How does the geopolitical resistance of Chicano border writing contest U.S. imperialism?

Note: Spanish texts will be available in English translation. Course Readings will come from: Herencia: Anthology of Hispanic Literature in the United States (2002) and a course reader with criticism. In addition, we’ll read three novels, likely María Amparo Ruíz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don; Jovita González, Caballero; and Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima.