Borderlands Representations

Catalog description

In this course, we will explore contemporary portrayals of border spaces and peoples in literature, film, visual art, and theory. We will engage an interdisciplinary and cross-genre exploration to examine the flexibility, tensions, and range of border-focused textual/artistic production. The Mexico-U.S. border will be the foundation and we will extend from this most familiar border to borders globally, with particular attention to the Canada-U.S. border, the Haitian-Dominican border, the Palestine/Israel nation states. Questions that will guide the course: How do representations of the Mexico-U.S. border reflect/converse with historical and contemporary political tensions? How do the perspectives and vantage points of Mexican, Chicano, and U.S. Anglo producers of cultural artifacts, including literature, diverge, collide, and coalesce? And, finally, how do perceptions and portrayals of geopolitical borders converse with understandings of the Mexico-U.S. border, what can we bring from our border-knowing to global borders, and what are specificities of particular border spaces?