Literatures of the Displaced: Diasporic Cultures in the United States

HIST-LIT 90HD Subject & Catalog Number

Description

Centering questions of home, nation, and identity, this course examines works by U.S.-based and U.S.-born writers in the context of key historical events that have shaped diasporic life in the U.S in the years following World War II: Japanese internment, the Civil Rights Movement, U.S. Cold War interventions in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean, the War on Terror, and the so-called illegal migrant crisis at the Mexico-U.S. border. We ask: how has the experience of displacement—whether forced or voluntary, undertaken as refugees, migrants, or exiles—shaped the terms of national belonging? And how has a shared sense of displacement, whether experienced firsthand or as psychic inheritance, helped to define how U.S. diasporic communities have come to understand, negotiate, and challenge their places in the U.S racial and imperial imagination? Alongside an array of historical sources including political speeches, activist publications and diaries, and government documents, primary course materials may include literary texts by James Baldwin, Mine Okubo, Ocean Vuong, and Jamaica Kincaid; performance art by Xandra Ibarra; films like Fly in Power and Mississippi Masala; and scholarship by Saidiya Hartman, Mimi Nguyen, Frantz Fanon, and Edward Said.