Studies in Contemporary Literature (461-0-21)
Topic
Contemporary Experiments in Racial Form
Instructors
Michelle Nancy Huang
847/491-6837
University 226
Office Hours: T 2pm - 3pm; W 2pm - 3pm
Meeting Info
University Hall 418: Thurs 2:00PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
This seminar surveys literary experiments in contemporary Ethnic American poetry and narrative that expand notions of what constitutes "ethnic literature," a category historically denigrated as insufficiently imaginative or aesthetically minded. In addition to highlighting the richness and complexity of these literary traditions, our goal in this course is to track evolving referents for racial formation in a "postracial" era defined by the gap between ostensible cultural tolerance and the persistence of structural inequality. Responding to the contradictions of racial representation, scholars of African American, Latinx, Asian American, and Native American literatures have redoubled critical engagement with form, genre, and aesthetics to expand our understanding of race's imbrications with embodiment, aesthetic judgment, cultural belonging, and the constitution of histories and futures. With particular emphasis on familiarizing students with foundational texts of Ethnic American Literature, the class will pressure critical terms and paradigms such as representation, racial formation, genre & form, voice & lyric, and history. Participants will develop skills of close reading for racial formation as a formal feature of textual composition as well as gain proficiency with central and emergent debates within Ethnic American literary studies regarding the relationship between politics and aesthetics.
Some conceptual questions for consideration include the following: how do experimental texts by writers of color destabilize conventional modes of understanding ethnic and racial representation? What tensions and resonances arise when critical race and ethnic studies meet theories of the avant-garde? And to what extent do these literary experiments suggest that race itself can be understood as a cultural form or generic object?
Class Materials (Required)
Assigned primary texts will likely include texts such as Mat Johnson's Pym, Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker, Salvador Plascencia's People of Paper, Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange, Ling Ma's Severance, Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties, Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands / La Frontera, Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Tommy Pico's Nature Poem, Natalie Diaz's Postcolonial Love Poem, Theresa Hak Yung Cha's Dictee, Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior, Myung Mi Kim's Commons, Craig Santos Perez's Habitat Threshold, Claudia Rankine's Citizen, Sesshu Foster's Atomik Aztex, Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist, and Cathy Park Hong's Dance Dance Revolution, among others. Assigned scholarship will likely include work by Gloria Anzaldúa, Kandice Chuh, Ralph Rodriguez, Ramón Saldívar, Stephen Sohn, Min Hyoung Song, Dorothy Wang and others.
Primary texts will be available at Norris Bookstore. All course readings besides the primary texts will be available on Canvas.