Reading & Composition

This course investigates hemispheric American literature, film and art from the 19 th to the 21 st centuries. We will investigate how history is rewritten inside these mediums and how these novelists, film-makers and artists revise the past in order to produce an alternative reality for previously silenced voices. How is history produced in the first place? What versions of history are retold inside these works and to what end? How can these re-makings of history enable alternative understandings of the past to occur? What role does the imagination play in remapping hemispheric American history? These are just some of the questions we will ask as we investigate the connection between literature, films, art and history in the hemispheric American context. We will explore how these art forms revise our understanding of slavery, colonialism, civil rights and contemporary
sociopolitical identity.

Potential Course Readings:
Kindred by Octavia Butler
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz
Almost a Woman by Esmeralda Santiago
Excerpts from Eduardo Galeano
Short stories by Sherman Alexie and Jorge Luis Borges
Selected poems by Maya Angelou, Pablo Neruda, Langston Hughes and Cherrie Moraga