This course examines contemporary and historical works by U.S. Latino authors, a pan-ethnic umbrella term that refers to an imagined community whose members share a common Latin American descent without necessarily sharing a concrete national background. Since its emergence in the 19th century from a foundational triad of ethnic communities (Mexican American, Cuban American, and Puerto Rican), Latino literature in the U.S. has been fuelled by a “dialectics of difference” (Ramón Saldívar) between minority and dominant cultures, including a quest for identity-formation as well as an assertion of difference within the anglophone U.S. literary tradition.

We will explore how these multiple and contradictory forces in the making of Latino literature are mediated through textual and formal patterns. The course is organized around paradigmatic debates and issues concerning Latino literature, and we will ask questions such as: In representing their minority histories of conquest and internal colonialism, how have Chicano and Puerto Rican authors adapted and transformed the Western genres of the historical novel and the historical romance? In protesting against their racialization and proletarianization after 1848, how have Chicano authors exposed the universalism of liberal individualism as a fiction, consequently pushing literary character-classification beyond the individual toward the collective? In articulating their bilingualism and biculturalism, how have Latino authors created a unique blend of anglophone and hispanophone literature—Spanglish American literature? In transposing the U.S. American story of immigration from transatlantic into hemispheric American trajectories, how have Latino authors reinvented the U.S. genre of ethnic autobiography and adapted the Latin American genre of magical realism? How has the literature of Latino exiles published by Cubans and other Latin Americans in the U.S. for more than two centuries deterritorialized fictional space by mapping a spatial dialectic between home and exile, and by addressing transnational imagined communities? During the civil rights era of the 1960s, how have Chicano and Puerto Rican authors forged militant aesthetics in literature akin to, but distinct from, the black arts movement?


Course texts: Américo Paredes, George Washington Gómez; Giannina Braschi, Yo-Yo Boeing; Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; Tomás Rivera, . . . Y no se lo tragó la tierra / . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him; Ana Castillo, So Far from God; Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States (selections), and a Course Reader with secondary literature.