This course draws from José David Saldivar’s call for reading practices that “articulate a new, trans-geographical conception of American culture—one more responsive to the hemisphere’s geographical ties and political crosscurrents than to narrow national ideologies.”

With this in mind, this course is organized around a selection of US ethnic literary and cultural texts that question and interrogate a singular notion of “America.” We will read texts that depict the varied geographies, histories, and peoples who constitute multiple forms of “America” and reveal the term to be more of a site of struggle rather than common place.

By analyzing US ethnic literary productions as sites of struggle over the identity, history, and territory of “America,” this course will engage with the following questions: How do literary and cultural texts represent and destabilize geographic and political borders? How do political borders organize forms of social identity, historical memory, and geographical space? How do literary productions represent historical formations of race, gender, and sexuality? What historical knowledges are released when we read fiction as a form of history writing, and how can we read history writing as a form of narrative?


Possible Primary texts:
• George Washington Gómez by Américo Paredes
• Corregidora by Gayl Jones
• Through the Arc of the Rainforest by Karen Tei Yamashita
• Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles by Gerald Vizenor