Listed in: Latinx and Latin Amer Studies, as LLAS-448 | Spanish, as SPAN-448
Megan Saltzman (Section 01)
(Offered as SPAN-448 and LLAS-448) With a historical and transnational approach, this course will explore bi/multicultural identities and communities in the Spanish-speaking world, primarily of the contemporary period: Mestizos, Korean-Argentineans, Afro-Peruvians, Latin American and Caribbean Chinatowns, Quechua-Castillian speakers, Spanglish-speakers from the United States to Gibraltar, Moroccans and West Africans in Spanish cities, “gallegos” in Buenos Aires, Filipino-Peruvian migrants in Tokyo and so on. Through a wide-variety of empirical, literary, and cultural texts (literature, film, music, graphic novel, photography, etc.), we will put diverse cases of ethnic and linguistic hybridity in dialogue with one another to study how communities and identities are represented, remembered, and demarcated; we will examine how they reclaim autonomy and space, and negotiate their personal and collective subjectivities amongst other communities and identities. Doing so will lead us to examine pressing socio-cultural phenomena that are increasingly global, rapidly-transforming, and interconnected: post/de/colonialism, bi/multiculturalism, transculturation, diaspora, immigration, exile, religion, borders, nationalism, nostalgia, capitalism, and structural in/exclusion. To help us study these issues and think of solutions, we will bring in theorists who have written on local and global hybridity (e.g., Bhabha, Spivek, Anzaldúa, Hall, Appiah). Inevitably, we will also discuss how these issues implicate us and our identities here in Amherst, MA in 2022. Students will have the opportunity to apply their knowledge as well as communicate personally with individuals who identify as bi/multicultural through a one-on-one interview project and invited speakers. Conducted in Spanish.
Prerequisite: Spanish 301 or permission of instructor. Spring Semester: Visiting Associate Professor Megan Saltzman.