Courses

This course is a comparative survey of late twentieth and twenty-first century ethnic American literature. The reading list reflects what I see as two dominant trends in ethnic American literature. First, many ethnic American authors have used metaphors and tropes of what we might call the incredible—the ghostly, otherworldly, or the magical— to imagine how literary and cultural formations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability are profoundly shaped by transnational histories, migrations, politics, and economies. Second, Ethnic American literature also reckons with events that themselves are “incredible”—unimaginable, difficult to fathom, or incomprehensible—both in extraordinary events and in everyday life. As we examine fiction, drama, a graphic novel, and a book of poetry, we’ll travel to and from places that are and aren’t familiar: a war-torn neighborhood, a nightclub in the Dominican Republic, the bustling streets of Calcutta, the boroughs of New York, the Oakland Coliseum, post-apocalyptic Baltimore, a community orchard in the Midwest. We’ll think about events on small and large scales: migrating to new places; slavery and settler colonialism; a global health care crisis; environmental disasters and food shortages; war both then and now. We’ll meet ghosts and angels, university first-years and professors, time-space travelers and poets, struggling parents and searching teenagers. Overall, the course argues that these forays into the extraordinary and the extra-ordinary are linked to how the texts contend with the troubling, disturbing, and often horrifying consequences of a transnational United States, marked by a history of expansion, domination, and violence. Yet we will also examine how these texts imagine alternative strategies for survival and community formation on large and small scales, and how they narrate unspoken stories and listen for unheard voices