English 190

Other Readings and Media

Description

In this course we will investigate the prodigious archive of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Latinx writing. This archive includes stories, poems, and chronicles published in Spanish-language newspapers throughout the United States, as well as such landmark books as Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1885), Alirio Díaz Guerra’s Lucas Guevara (1914), Facundo Bernal’s A Stab in the Dark (1923), Julia de Burgos’s Song of the Simple Truth (1938), and Américo Paredes’s George Washington Gómez. Our goal will be to understand the experiences of modernity these texts describe, and how those experiences are inextricable from histories of colonization, migration, and exploitation. We will pay particular attention to the development of Latinidad as a hemispheric critique of US imperialism that travels through and is transformed by US Latinx writing. What are the affordances and limits of Latinidad as a framework for thinking about racialization in the US context? In addition to exploring these topics, we will learn together about different approaches to literary research, with an emphasis on historical-archival research. We will practice formulating research questions, writing abstracts, building an argument, and revising an original research paper through multiple drafts.