"America" in Diaspora Literatures

Catalog description

How have diasporic and immigrant writers come to see the United States? How do these writers negotiate dominant understandings of race, gender, ethnicity, religion, and language that come to define "the nation"? Is all immigrant/minority writing necessarily (auto)biographical? How are notions of history, memory, and futurity taken up by writers of diasporic and hybrid cultures in the US? These are some of the questions that this course will take up through a close reading of canonical and contemporary African-American, South/Asian-American, and Arab-American texts. This course is ideal for students interested in minority literatures, diaspora studies, and Ethnic Studies.