ÀÏÍõÂÛ̳

Gloria Anzaldúa has famously described the U.S.-Mexico border as an open wound and the border culture that arises from this fraught site as a third country. This course, with Jennifer Harford Vargas, explore how Chicana/os and Latina/os creatively represent different kinds of migrations across geo-political borders and between cultural traditions to forge transnational identities and communities. Over the course of the semester, we probe the role that literature, art, film, and music can play in the struggle for migrants’ rights and minority civil rights, querying how the imagination and aesthetics can contribute to social justice.

Migration and borderlands dominate headlines as well as the everyday experiences of millions of people around the world, as vast numbers of human bodies move through spaces interrupted by variously-contested and regulated natural barriers and barricades. This course will situate our current transnational conjuncture in the long duree of global migration engendered by developments at the turn of the 16th century, focusing on the migration of indentured and contract labor migration from the Indian subcontinent to the Pacific and Indian Oceans, the Persian Gulf, Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas, Britain, and Europe. Some key questions we will explore are: to what degree have techniques of governance (measuring, surveilling) practiced and routinized through the various colonial empires of the 19th and 20th centuries informed the production and circulation of knowledge (specifically academic disciplines like History) as well as the naturalization of analytical and descriptive categories like labor, race and class -- and vice versa? Moreover, to what degree have intertwined technologies and protocols of governance and knowledge-production contributed to obscuring gendered migration, but also the effects of this gendering (hidden in plain sight) for women? Taught by Madhavi Kale.

This course, taught by Veronica Montes, considers comparative and historical approaches to the sociology of immigration, with a focus on the late twentieth century through the present, spending a good deal of time on the longest running labor migration in the world, Mexican immigration to the U.S., as well as on Central American migrant communities in the United States. Students with an interest in contemporary U.S. immigration are exposed to a survey of key theoretical approaches and relevant issues in immigration studies in the social sciences.

Gloria Anzaldúa has famously described the U.S.-Mexico border as an open wound and the border culture that arises from this fraught site as a third country. This course, with Jennifer Harford Vargas, explore how Chicana/os and Latina/os creatively represent different kinds of migrations across geo-political borders and between cultural traditions to forge transnational identities and communities. Over the course of the semester, we probe the role that literature, art, film, and music can play in the struggle for migrants’ rights and minority civil rights, querying how the imagination and aesthetics can contribute to social justice.

This course, taught by Veronica Montes, considers comparative and historical approaches to the sociology of immigration, with a focus on the late twentieth century through the present, spending a good deal of time on the longest running labor migration in the world, Mexican immigration to the U.S., as well as on Central American migrant communities in the United States. Students with an interest in contemporary U.S. immigration are exposed to a survey of key theoretical approaches and relevant issues in immigration studies in the social sciences.

This course, taught by Rosi Song, is an introduction the history of immigration in the Hispanic world starting in the 19th century to the present day, examining how this migratory flow has been represented textually and visually in literature, art, films, and documentaries. We read theoretical texts on migration and discuss fiction and films that illustrate the experience of immigration in the Hispanic world. Students develop close-reading techniques and ways of analyzing written and visual texts that helps us frame questions about the experience of migration and its representation.