Border Fictions/Migration Narratives

Catalog description

How does a nation's understanding of its borders come into being? Conversely, how do borders contribute to fictions about a nation-the possibilities it offers and who is considered a legitimate member of its community? How do multiple and often contradictory discourses and images shape the stories told about migration and the people who migrate? How do migrants document their own narratives as they cross, re-cross, and contest borders? How can their stories along with the work of artists, scholars and activists challenge dominant narratives and unravel the myths that help to give borders and related terms-refuge, asylum, immigrant, citizen--their meaning and even their power? In this course, we will explore the stakes in in the shaping of narratives of borders and migration. Though much of the course will focus on recent crises at the southern border of the United States, we will locate these crises in their longer histories and extended geographies, and we will put them in dialogue with contestations of borders and narratives of migrations in other geographical locations. The seminar will draw from narrative fiction and on-fiction, poetry, historical documents, the work of historians, visual artists, filmmakers, performance artists, political theorists, media scholars and anthropologists. Possible authors/scholars/artists include: Valeria Luselli, Oscar Martínez, Gloria Anzaldua, Alex Rivera, Wendy Brown, Claudia Hernández, Javier Zamora, among many others.