Latinx Field Formations and The Politics of Transformative Study

Catalog description

How do social justice and decolonial movements transform our habits of study and our systems of valuation? This course will examine the emergence of Latinx Studies as a field, paying careful attention to the creative arts (theater, literature, dance, film, art, music) in tension with the challenges emerging alongside social movements including school desegregation, environmental justice, anticarceral, immigrant and voting rights struggles. Not only will our work consider how performative practices have been central to such struggles, but we will also examine how the study of these practices became a discipline in the academy (just as they were disciplined by it). We will study major literary texts as well as other creative forms to understand how a sutured Latinidad emerged.