Class Archive

137T/1

Topics in Chicano Literature and Culture:
Riding Chicanx Literature’s First Wave and Beyond, c/s

MW 5-6:30

“The student of Chicano literature will look back at this group and this first period as the foundation of whatever is to come, even if only as the generation against whom those to come rebel. The best of the best will survive—but then ...(read more)

137B/1

Chicana/o Literature and Culture Since 1910

MWF 12-1

This course will focus exclusively on the study of Chicanx/La...(read more)

166/2

Special Topics:
Burn it Down/Build it Up: Protest, Dissent, and the Politics of Resistance

TTh 11-12:30

This course takes up the question of protest and dissent &nda...(read more)

190/11

Research Seminar:
Latinx Modernism

TuTh 2-3:30

In this course we will investigate the prodigious archive of ...(read more)

165/3

Special Topics:
Popular Music and Social Critique

TTh 9:30-11

At the onset of the Second World War, a Communist country music singer armed with an acoustic guitar demands the nation examine the consequences of a man-made climate crisis and pledges to destroy fascism both at home and abroad…  ...(read more)

190/9

Research Seminar:
Chicanx Literature, Art and Performance

TTh 5-6:30

In this course, we will read the classics of Chicanx literature from the 1960s through the present.  We will open with Jose Antonio Villareall's Pocho (1959), a novel of both immigrant and first generation experience in ...(read more)

31AC/1

Literature of American Cultures:
American Hustle: Race, Ethnicity, and Dreams of Getting Ahead

TTh 9:30-11

In this class, we are going to do and to talk about work: getting work, making it work, working the system.

This course, which constitutes a survey of ethnic American literature, asks about the desires, imagination, and labor that go into...(read more)

C136/1

Topics in American Studies:
The Wall: Art, Literature, Performance on and about the U.S.-Mexican Border

MWF 2-3

This will be a course in which we will think about the emergence of a distinct border aesthetic, one in which form is often torqued by dispiriting content but which, simultaneously, also finds beauty in the cultural and natural ecologies that trace...(read more)

135AC/1

Literature of American Cultures:
American Hustle

Lectures TTh 4-5 in 140 Barrows + one hour of discussion section per week in 305 Wheeler (sec. 101: F 12-1; sec. 102: F 1-2)

This course, which constitutes a survey of ethnic American literature, asks about the desires, imagination, and labor that go into the American dream. What is the relationship between immigration and dreams of upward mobility in America? This cours...(read more)

137T/1

Topics in Chicanx Literature and Culture:
Chicanx Novels

MWF 1-2

This course will focus exclusively on the study of Chicanx novels. The themes and formal features in these novels have been influenced to a large degree by a broad range of social experiences: living in the borderlands of nationality, language, pol...(read more)

165AC/1

Special Topics in American Cultures:
Ethnicity, Religion and Literature

TTh 11-12:30

This class will explore how 20^th- and 21^st-century American prose fictions have imagined the relationship between religion and ethnicity. Our first questions will be formal: How do different formal choices allow these writers ...(read more)

166/2

Special Topics:
The Literature & Art of Incarceration

MWF 11-12

This is a course on the literature of incarceration variously defined and experienced across a range of control systems that attempt to stunt the entire human being. I want to think about the forms of suppression, confinement, and the humiliations ...(read more)

31AC/1

Literature of American Cultures:
Growing Up Funny

MWF 9-10

America, we are told, is a nation of immigrants—of people from other lands who travel here and “become” American. That's a tall order. But what of those who can never quite belong—the misfits, outliers and strangers in t...(read more)

137B/1

Chicana/o Literature and Culture Since 1910:
Riding Chicanx Literature's First Wave and Beyond, c/s

TTh 11-12:30

"The student of Chicano literature will look back at this group and this first period as the foundation of whatever is to come, even if only as the generation against whom those to come rebel. The best of the best will survive—but then s...(read more)

137T/1

Topics in Chicana/o Literature and Culture:
Workers and Rebels in U. S. Latinx Novels

MWF 11-12

This course will focus on representations of workers and rebels in U.S. Latinx novels. We will investigate the ways in which the issues of work and political activism are central themes in much U.S. Latinx literature. The formal features and themat...(read more)

37/1

Chicana/o Literature and Culture

TuWTh 9:30-12

This course is an introductory survey of the aesthetic forms and social locations of Chicanx art and literature in the United States, from the U.S.-Mexico War of 1846-1848 to our present moment of anti-immigrant nativism, which is signified rhetori...(read more)

180A/1

Autobiography:
Chicanx Autobiographies

TTh 11-12:30

The autobiography is a problematic narrative form. In telling their stories, Chicanx autobiographers reconstruct the past partly by relying on unreliable memory, creating the illusion of historical accuracy through the imagination. Chicanx autobiog...(read more)

137B/1

Chicana/o Literature and Culture Since 1910:
Chicanx Novels

TTh 11-12:30

This course will focus exclusively on the study of Chicanx novels. As we shall see, the formal features and thematic representations of these novels have been influenced to a large degree by a broad range of social experiences: living in the border...(read more)

203/5

Graduate Readings:
Contemporary Chicanx/Latinx Novels

TTh 2-3:30

In this course, we’ll examine narrative form in several Chicanx/Latinx novels, focusing on the role of problematic narrators. We’ll explore the specific ways that these novels tend to reify the social world through the eyes and voice of...(read more)

137T/1

Topics in Chicana/o Literature and Culture:
Chicana/o Popular Culture

TTh 11-12:30

What is Chicanx popular culture? We answer this question by first exploring the meaning of these three terms separately. Chicana/o/x, popular (or lo popular), and culture have rich political trajectories that span the transnational co...(read more)

C136/1

Topics in American Studies:
The Fields: California Farmworker Literature

TTh 2-3:30

This course will focus on the lives and struggles of Mexican farm workers in California as represented in Chicano/a literature from the 1970s to the early twentieth-first century—or roughly the period that coincides with the rise of neoliber...(read more)

137B/1

Chicana/o Literature and Culture Since 1910:
Chicanx/Latinx Novels

TTh 11-12:30

In this course, we’ll read a cluster of post-1970 Chicanx/Latinx novels.  We’ll explore a variety of issues and experiences—race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, political activism, revolution, philosophy, art, storytelling, a...(read more)

250/2

Research Seminar:
Ethnic Modernisms

Tues. 3:30-6:30

This seminar will explore the convergence of modernist and ethnic cultures in twentieth-century America and Europe, placing race and ethnicity in dialogue with the modernist compulsion to "make it new" and the avant-gardist compulsion to...(read more)

137B/1

Chicana/o Literature and Culture Since 1910

This course has been canceled.

137T/1

Topics in Chicana/o Literature and Culture:
The Chicana/o Novel

MWF 12-1

This course on Chicana/o and Latina/o novels complements a Chicana/o literature course I taught in the fall entitled “Migrant Narratives.”  But whereas the fall course included works that represented various literary genres (the n...(read more)

31AC/1

Literature of American Cultures:
Immigrant Inscriptions

TTh 11-12:30

In this course we will consider a variety of texts—contemporary fiction, classic and new film, journalism, history, and cultural criticism—that help us explore the possibilities for writing the migrant self and experience. The shifting...(read more)

137B/1

Chicana/o Literature and Culture Since 1910:
Migrant Narratives

TTh 11-12:30

The topic of this course is “migrant narratives,” referring both to narratives about migrants and narratives that cross boundaries of one kind or another.  We’ll read a cluster of Chicana/o literary works published between 1...(read more)

31AC/1

Literature of American Cultures:
Immigrant Inscriptions

TTh 9:30-11

A few miles from UC Berkeley’s campus, positioned in the San Francisco Bay near Alcatraz, sits Angel Island, site of a California State Park and one-time “processing center” (1910-1940) for migrants crossing the Pacific into the ...(read more)

166/2

Special Topics:
Chicano Literature and History

TTh 2-3:30

The Chicano Movement of the late sixties and early seventies was a social movement that reshaped the political and cultural landscape of the Mexican American community. It represented a political challenge to inequality and racism as well as a cul...(read more)

37/1

Chicana/o Literature and Culture

MWF 1-2

We will survey the literary and cultural production of the Chicano/a Movement during the 1960s through the mid-1980s. This was a particularly fertile period during which the civil rights movement fomented a cultural florescence within the Chicano ...(read more)

N31AC/1

Literature of American Cultures:
Democracy and Division

MTuTh 2-4

The United States Constitution refers to “We, the People,” as if it’s obvious who’s included in – and excluded from – that “we.” In fact, though, the reality has always been much messier. Fights over...(read more)

137T/1

Topics in Chicana/o Literature and Culture:
Gender and Class

TTh 12:30-2

In this course, we will explore the interconnectedness of gender and class as represented in a cluster of Chicana/o literary works, films, and art.  The films will include Lourdes Portillo and Nina Serrano’s, Despues del Terremoto (...(read more)

141/1

Modes of Writing (Exposition, Fiction, Verse, etc.):
Race, Creative Writing, and Difference

TTh 2-3:30

This course is an inquiry into the ways that race is constructed in literary texts and a look-by-doing at our own practices as people engaged in creative writing.

The purpose of writing in this course is, broadly stated, to engage public la...(read more)

143N/1

Prose Nonfiction:
Traveling, Thinking, Writing

Thurs. 3:30-6:30

Much of American literature has had to do with a sense of motion. Note the journeys, e.g., in the best known texts of Melville and Twain. But note also that Harlemite Langston Hughes’ autobiography, The Big Sea, begins on a boat and...(read more)

180A/1

Autobiography:
American Autobiography: Race, Gender, Culture

TTh 11-12:30

We will take a group of texts--conventional memoir, poetry, painting, photography, and I-focused new media--to explore what American auto/bio/graphy really means.  We will start in the 18th century with Benjamin Franklin and close with a...(read more)

137T/1

Topics in Chicana/o Literature and Culture:
Chicano Art and Literature

TTh 12:30-2

We will survey Chicano/a literature, art and film from the Chicano/a Movement (1960s through the 1980s) through more recent political and aesthetic formations.

The class will open with study of  a particularly fertile period during whi...(read more)

135AC/1

Literature of American Cultures:
Repression and Resistance

TTh 12:30-2

In this course we will analyze representations of repression and resistance in nine novels, three each from the following three cultural groups: Chicanos/Chicanas, African Americans, and Euro-Americans.  We will examine various forms of repre...(read more)

137T/1

Topics in Chicana/o Literature and Culture:
Chicano Poetry--Text and Context

MWF 1-2

We will open with "Yo soy Joaquin"/"I am Joaquin," Rodolfo 'Corky' Gonzalez's stirring political poem of 1968 that inspired a politically based literary output that dominated Chicano poetics for well over a decade a...(read more)