Graduate Courses with DEI focus

Fall 2022

ENGL/WGST 666: Queer LatinX Literature & Photography

Professor María DeGuzmán

MWF 10:10-11:00AM

This course explores novels and short stories by LatinX writers that focus in one way or another on photographs & photography and, in doing so, that simultaneously question (or “queer”) certain cultural givens about gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, nationality, class, and other coordinates of identity, identification, and subjectivity. We will give careful consideration to each of the terms in the title of this course (Queer, LatinX, Photography, Literature) as we investigate the connections between this double focus on photography and literature. At the same time, we will examine actual photo-based visual work by a wide variety of LatinX artists. Visual and textual works considered include those by Alma López, Laura Aguilar, Félix Gonzalez-Torres, John Rechy, Achy Obejas, Helena María Viramontes, Emma Pérez, Elias Miguel Muñoz, Graciela Limón, Carla Trujillo, Aiden Thomas, and others. Open to both undergraduate and graduate students. Graduate students can take this course for seminar credit by writing a seminar length final paper in addition to completing the other assignments for the course.

ENGL 762: Asian American Studies

Professor Heidi Kim

Tuesday 2:00 – 5:00 p.m.

This seminar will create a broad and intersectional introduction to Asian American literature and studies. Students will read and lead discussion on several primary literary texts of different genres as well as selections from classic and cutting-edge texts of Asian Americanist theorists, including Lisa Lowe, Quynh Nguyen, and David Eng. The course will be oriented around different debates/trends in Asian American studies and allied fields such as critical refugee studies and critical race theory.

Spring 2022

CMPL 547/KOR 447: Documenting Diasporas: Korean Diasporas in Films and
Documentaries

Dr. Ji-Yeon O. Jo

Tuesday/Thursday 11:00 – 12:15 p.m.

This course will critically examine how Korean diaspora cinema imagines, interrogates, and interprets the lived experiences of diaspora Koreans in different trans/national spaces. In this course, students will be introduced to a variety of films that explore multiple, shifting, and often contested diasporic subjectivities. The course is structured around five intersecting themes: 1) Borders, 2) Home/Homelands, 3) Displaced/emplaced Lives, 4) Transnational Adoption, and 5) Coming of Age: Youth, Gender, and Sexuality. We will view films made by Korean diaspora filmmakers as well as films exploring the experiences, conditions, and spaces of the Korean diasporas across Asia, Central Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

ENGL 690: Asian American Studies

Dr. Heidi Kim

Tuesday 2:00 – 4:50 p.m.

This mixed-level course will create a broad and intersectional introduction to Asian American literature and studies. Students will read and lead discussion on several primary literary texts of different genres as well as selections from classic and cutting-edge texts of Asian Americanist theorists, including Lisa Lowe, Quynh Nguyen, and David Eng. Students will also have the opportunity to help shape the selection of texts in the second half of the term.

ENGL 690: Queer LatinX Environmentalisms

Prof. Maria DeGuzman

Thursday 3:00 – 5:50 p.m.

This course examines queer LatinX literature from the 1990s to the present as it intersects with ecological and environmentalist concerns. We explore how these cultural productions question normative assumptions about the “order of things,” the “naturalness” of nature, and the “inevitability” of the historical exploitations of coloniality and the ongoing predations of neocolonialism. We pay close attention to LatinX cultural productions that approach cosmology, ecology, and environmental justice from queer perspectives and that queer ecological concerns from minoritized perspectives. “Queer” and “LatinX” combined with one another and modifying “Environmentalisms” signal other ways of thinking, doing, being, and becoming. These other ways entail exploring concepts of “nature” entangled with and dis-entangled from the coercive essentialisms of “natural law” and the violent settler-colonialism informing patriarchal capitalist “normalcy”; thinking beyond the blinders of heteronormative and species-hierarchical traditional humanism; perceiving and valuing multiple forms of kinship between humans and between humans and other life forms; ceasing to measure worth by a compulsory procreational model; conceiving sustainable interdependencies and thriving assemblages; and cultivating the diversity of diversity as part of salvaging what remains of biodiversity in this time of human-induced global and planetary crisis. Assignments: two 8-page essays (for graduate students the second essay is 22–25 pages long), active class participation, and final exam. The grade percentage distribution is as follows: essay 1 (30%), essay 2 (40%), final exam (20%), and class participation (10%).

The Literature of Hate

Dr. Danielle Christmas

Thursdays 5:00 – 7:50 p.m.

The social and political tenor of the moment has brought the normalization of white nationalist rhetoric into relief. However, Americans have always found creative ways to express a desire to exclude or eradicate the racial other. In this graduate seminar, students will look at the arc of fiction narratives that have inspired and defined contemporary hate movements in the United States. Starting with Thomas Dixon’s neo-Confederate romance The Clansman (1905), we will move through the foundational texts of white nationalism today, including Jean Raspail’s refugee apocalypse The Camp of the Saints (1973), William Pierce’s race-war account The Turner Diaries (1978), and globalization dystopias like Ward Kendall’s Hold Back This Day (2001). We will also discuss those mainstream works that have been adopted into the white nationalist canon, including Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice (1813) and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991). Finally, our discussion will be contextualized using social critiques like J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016) and Vegas Tenold’s Everything You Love Will Burn (2018). By the end of the semester, students will have the capacity to understand the place of this literary subculture within the larger body of contemporary American cultural production and the urgent discourses of race and violence that animate it. Students should have a high tolerance for disturbing content and a spirit of critical curiosity.

Fall 2021

English 666: Queer LatinX Literature & Photography

María DeGuzmán

TW 11:00AM-12:15 PM

This course explores novels and short stories by LatinX writers that focus in one way or another on photographs & photography and, in doing so, that simultaneously question (or “queer”) certain cultural givens about gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, nationality, class, and other coordinates of identity, identification, and subjectivity. We will give careful consideration to each of the terms in the title of this course (Queer, LatinX, Photography, Literature) as we investigate the connections between this double focus on photography and literature. At the same time, we will examine actual photo-based visual work by a wide variety of LatinX artists. Visual and textual works considered include, but are not limited to, those by Alma López, Laura Aguilar, Félix Gonzalez-Torres, John Rechy, Achy Obejas, Helena María Viramontes, Emma Pérez, Elias Miguel Muñoz, Graciela Limón, and Carla Trujillo. [This course is open to both undergraduates and graduate students and can count as a graduate seminar when the graduate student completes a 20-25-page seminar paper as the final assignment (rather than an 8-10-page final project) in addition to the other course assignments (an 8- page essay #1 and the final exam.]

ENGL 872: Studies in African American and African Diasporan Literature

Meta Jones

What is the relationship between African American and African Diaspora literature, theory, journalism, music and visual art? Do “Black” writers favor certain artistic and literary genres over others in order to delineate the dynamics of diaspora? Why have so many writers turned to memoir, travel narratives, photography, film and auto-ethnography to engage their diasporic experiences? This course aims to ground students in the diverse theoretical vocabulary, literary, artistic, and digital genres through which the concept of “Black,” African-American and African Diaspora studies has emerged. While attention will be given to diaspora theory and its production within the Black Atlantic framework, this course is also equally concerned with considering literary production and geographic sites of memory by artists operating beyond that frame, including the Black Pacific. Disparate writers have evinced longing for, or belonging to, African-American and Anglophone African Diaspora communities. Why are some cities, sites, regions and countries within and beyond Africa often sourced as racially, culturally or politically “representative” regions for return in memoirs, art, poetry, biography and scholarship while others are less engaged by scholars and writers? Exploring these questions will serve to fulfill a course primary objective and learning outcome goals: to read, review and write about poets, memoirist, novelists, fashionistas, journalists, visual artists and scholars whose intellectual and creative outpouring evokes the historical conditions and contemporary contradictions that co-produce “Black” diasporic subjects. Contact Professor Jones for a full bibliography of varied primary and secondary course readings. Assignments Include: Class Participation (15 %) Includes: Discussion Questions Due electronically 4pm the Tuesday before each Wed class Mandatory, Punctual Attendance, In Class Generative Keyword and Timed Writing Assignments (To Develop Reading Engagement in Final Written Projects); & Collaborative 2 Diasporic “Memory Dishes” and Foodways Potluck Seminar Critical Seminar Co-Leading Presentation & with Individual Reading Precis (15%) Critical and/or Creative Timed Reading Responses (15%) Book Review (1500 words) (15%) Final Project: Abstract, Annotated Bibliography; Keyword Index, Conference Length Paper, (40%) Includes: DRAFT; Peer Review (15% of 40%)

Spring 2021

English 864-001: Seminar on LatinX Environmentalisms

María DeGuzmán

M 3:35pm-6:35pm

This graduate seminar introduces students to various poieses, practices, and implications of “LatinX environmentalisms.” We investigate the “LatinX” and the “environmentalisms” (plural) in relation to one another and together, exponentially. We consider how these LatinX environmentalisms engage histories of colonialism, lived experiences of neo-colonialism, and figure the intersection of nature and culture in terms of the effects of the “Anthropocene” and the struggle for environmental justice. We consider a variety of critical approaches, a range of literary genres (nonfiction, novels, short stories, drama, and poetry), visual productions (film, photography, installation art, mural art, and other public art), and some youth development, place-based environmental literacy projects. We consider the ways in which these LatinX environmentalisms intersect with, yet also—in their pronounced concern with environmental justice—differ from “mainstream” environmentalism with its focus on conservation, preservation, and wilderness. We strive to develop a nuanced understanding of the plurality of approaches within LatinX environmentalisms as indicated by our primary texts, visual productions, and critical readings.

ENGL 472: African American Literature

Meta Jones

TuTh 2:00pm-3:15pm

Fall 2020

CMPL 747: The Novel in Spanish America II: Comparative and Interdisciplinary Seminar

Alicia Rivero

TuTh 2:00pm-3:15pm

We will examine the theory and practice of the Latin American novel and novella since the 1960s, as well as hyper- and digital texts. We’ll explore this together with major international trends and writers in order to better understand the innovativeness of said novel(la) and the cross-pollination of ideas that affected the development of these novelistic forms. Among the topics that we will discuss are the following: the Spanish American “boom” of the 60s and 70s; modernity, the postboom and postmodernity; magical realism and the contrasting “McOndo”; race; gender; cultural studies (for example, pop culture such as film and music, as well as techno, cyber, and digital culture); the historical novel and historiographic metafiction, etc. The course will be conducted in English and translations will be available, but specialists will read the texts in the original language. Note: Some of the topics, texts and authors are relevant to the Spanish MA reading list for the qualifying exam. Required texts: (1) Printed: Cortázar, Rayuela/Hopscotch (a precursor to hypertexts); García Márquez, Del amor y otros demonios/Of Love and Other Demons (novella); Allende, La casa de los espíritus/The House of the Spirits; Puig, El beso de la mujer araña/The Kiss of the Spider Woman; Fuguet, Las películas de mi vida/The Movies of My Life; Fuentes, Los años con Laura Díaz/The Years with Laura Díaz; Rushdie, Midnight’s Children; Lispector, A Hora da estrela/The Hour of the Star (novella). (2) Selected, free, digital novel(la) online (TBA). Readings may vary due to availability. Work for the course: (1) active participation; (2) a presentation in English–unless everyone understands Spanish well–containing research on a theoretical/critical or literary text on the syllabus, chosen by the student and presented similarly to a conference paper (= 40% of the grade); (3) a research paper (= 60%). The latter may be written in Spanish or English; it must combine theory with textual analysis and criticism and will either be a rewrite of the presentation or may be on a new topic, per the student’s choice but subject to the instructor’s approval.

Fall 2019

English 762: The Literature of Hate

Dr. Danielle Christmas

The social and political tenor of the moment has brought the normalization of white nationalist rhetoric into relief. However, Americans have always found creative ways to express a desire to exclude or eradicate the racial other. In this graduate course, students will look at the arc of fiction narratives that have inspired and defined contemporary hate movements in the United States. Starting with Thomas Dixon’s neo-Confederate romance The Clansman (1905), we will move through the foundational texts of white nationalism today, including Jean Raspail’s refugee apocalypse The Camp of the Saints (1973), William Pierce’s race-war account The Turner Diaries (1978), and Ward Kendall’s globalization dystopia Hold Back This Day (2001). We will also examine those mainstream works that have been adopted into the white nationalist canon, including Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962) and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996). Finally, our discussion will be contextualized using social critiques like J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and Vegas Tenold’s Everything You Love Will Burn. By the end of the semester, students will have the capacity to understand the place of this literary subculture within the larger body of contemporary American cultural production and the urgent discourses of race and violence that animate it. Students should have a high tolerance for disturbing content and a spirit of critical curiosity.

English 864: Seminar on LatinX Environmentalisms

Dr. María DeGuzmán

This graduate seminar introduces students to various significations, poieses (including ecopoetics) / practices, and implications of everyday “LatinX environmentalisms” — the “LatinX” and the “environmentalisms” (plural) in relation to one another and together, exponentially. We will consider how these LatinX environmentalisms engage histories of colonialism, lived experiences of neocolonialism, and figure the intersection of nature and culture in terms of the effects of the Anthropocene and the struggle for environmental justice. We will consider a variety of critical approaches, a range of literary genres (nonfiction, novels, short stories, drama, and poetry), visual productions (film, photography, installation art, mural art, and other public art), and some youth development, place-based environmental literacy projects. We will consider the ways in which these LatinX environmentalisms both contribute to and also differ from Anglo American culture’s hegemonic environmentalism (with its focus on conservation, preservation, and wilderness). And, we will strive to develop a nuanced understanding of the plurality of approaches within LatinX environmentalisms as indicated by our primary texts, visual productions, and critical readings.

Regular class attendance and participation are required each and every day the class meets.

Assignments: Consistent class attendance and participation, an 8 to 10-page essay, and an end of term paper (journal article quality) around 20 – 25 pages.

Outline of Requirements. All these assignments will be graded and all are due on the days indicated below:

• Completed readings done on time, attendance, and active participation in class(10%)
• 8-10-page standard expository Essay # 1 (40%). Due Friday Sept. 27, 2019 in class.
• 20-25-page standard expository Essay # 2 (50%). Due Monday November 25 in class.

REQUIRED READING & VIEWING:

Agua Pura and Los Pescadores (Pure Water and the Fishers), youth development, place-based, watershed education and environmental literacy project. Read Anthony Michael Marzolla’s paper “Agua Pura and Los Pescadores: Latino Youth and Families Engage in Water Resource Issues” on the project at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/255623898_Agua_Pura_and_Los_Pescadores_Latino_Youth _and_Families_Engage_in_Water_Resource_Issues

Alcalá, Kathleen. The Deepest Roots: Finding Food and Community on a Pacific Northwest Island. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2016.

Anaya, Rudolfo. Bless Me, Ultima. New York: Warner Books, 1972. (At one time banned in four states: New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and California). ISBN: 978-0446600255.

Carrera Zamanillo, María Isabel. PH.D. Dissertation completed in 2017 at the University of Washington titled Cultivando Comunidad: A Community-Based Approach to Study the Link Between Culture and Environmental Identities in Latinx Living in the Seattle Metropolitan Area. Link to dissertation online: https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/bitstream/handle/1773/40900/CarreraZamanillo_was hington_0250E_17977.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y.

Cohen, Jerome and Lowell Duckert, ed. Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. ISBN: 978-0816693092.

DeGuzmán, María. “LatinX Botanical Epistemologies.” In Cultural Dynamics. 24 September 2018. Available online at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0921374018802021

De Lima, Lucas. Wet Land (Action Books, 2014) and Terraputa (Birds of Lace, 2014). Both of these books may be ordered through Small Press Distribution in Berkeley, CA. Contact info for SPD: https://www.spdbooks.org/pages/about/contact-spd.aspx

Goodwin, Matthew David, ed. Latin@ Rising: An Anthology of Latin@ Science Fiction and Fantasy. San Antonio, TX: Wings Press, 2017. Selections from this anthology.

Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierette. Paradise Transplanted: Migration and the Making of California Gardens. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014.

Mercado, Nancy. “Litany for Change” and selected poems from It Concerns the Madness (Long Shot Productions, 2000). Writer, editor, poet, and activist. Website for more information: http://btn.com/2017/11/13/rutgers-launched-the-career-of-this-puerto-rican-poet-now-shes-fightingfor-the-earths-future-btn-livebig/

Milian, Claudia. “Extremely Latin, XOXO: Notes on LatinX.” In Cultural Dynamics, vol. 29, no. 3, August 2017, pp. 121–140. Available online at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0921374017727850

Montero, Mayra. In the Palm of Darkness (trans. E. Grossman). New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997.

Moraga, Cherríe. Heroes and Saints & Other Plays. Albuquerque, NM: West End Press, 1994.

Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas exhibition. Investigate environmental and environmental justice preoccupations in this exhibition at the Queens Museum (Flushing Meadows, Corona Park, Queens, NY), April 7 – August 18, 2019.

Nieves, Myrna. “The House, the Fish and the Tree” and other poems in Breaking Ground: Anthology of Puerto Rican Women Writers in New York, 1980 – 2012. New York: Editorial Campana, 2012. https://www.eco-poetry.org/myrna-neives.html https://mnieves23.wixsite.com/myrna-nieves

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. ISBN: 9780674072343.

Peña, Devon G. “The Scope of Latino/a Environmental Studies.” In Latino Studies journal. March 2003, Vol. 1, Issue 1, pp. 47–78. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/palgrave.lst.8600009

Rivera, Alex (director). Sleep Dealer. 2008. Color film on DVD. 90-minute speculative fiction film set on the U.S. / Mexico border. Distributed by Maya Entertainment (Mexico / U.S.).

ENGL 875: Critical Race Theory-Graduate Seminar

Dr. Meta Jones

Wed 11-1:50pm.

Theory, Genre, and Memory/Memoir in “Black” Diaspora Literature and Art What theories or genres best delineate the dynamics of diaspora as a process of literal, literary and visual travel–and of imaginative memory? How do contemporary writers and visual artists practice diaspora poetically? What are the aesthetic investments of disparate writers and theorists and how do these investments illuminate or obscure the embodiment of “blackness” in diasporic thought and practice? Each of the poets, novelists, journalists, legal scholars–and especially memoirist/auto/bio/critographers we will read and photographers, painters and sculptures we’ll view evoke the historical conditions and contradictions that contribute to the construction of Black diasporic subjects–historically and contemporarily This course aims to ground students in the theoretical vocabulary through which the concept of the “Black”/African Diaspora has emerged, the readings draw from a rich variety disciplines, including, geography, poetics, history, and feminist and queer studies of literature and art. This graduate seminars core texts will span from the 1940s to the very present, and explore the process of marking, making, and memo the racialized image and body— with its intrinsic connections to gender, sexuality, and class, as they are reproduced through region, geography, and nation.

Spring 2019

ENGL 666: Queer Latina/o Photography and Literature.

Maria Deguzman

TR 11:00

This course explores novels and short stories by Latina/o writers that focus in one way or another on photographs & photography and, in doing so, that simultaneously question (or “queer”) certain cultural givens about gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity/nationality, class, and other coordinates of identity and subjectivity. We will investigate the connections between this double focus. At the same time, we will examine actual photo-based visual work by Latina/o artists. Textual and visual works considered include those by Alma López, Laura Aguilar, Axel Damian Reyes, Gerardo Suter, Franc Franca, Roberto Rincón, John Rechy, Achy Obejas, Helena María Viramontes, Emma Pérez, Elias Miguel Muñoz, Félix González-Torres, Graciela Limón, and Carla Trujillo.

Outline of Requirements.

All these assignments will be graded:

• Completed readings done on time, attendance, and active participation in class (10%)
• 7 page double-spaced standard expository essay (30%).
• 10 page double-spaced final project, standard expository or creative (40%).
• Final Exam (20%)

Fall 2018

English 763: Race, Sex, & Medical Humanities

GerShun Avilez

T 3:30

This interdisciplinary graduate seminar will explore how questions of race and sexuality impact issues of health, medicine, and illness in 20th century U.S. literature and popular culture. The goal of the course is to offer students tools to analyze literature, make them more familiar with histories of medical experimentation and exploitation, and provide them with the tools to think critically about pressing social issues. Students will also gain a vocabulary and develop for skills working across disciplines. Specific areas covered will include suffering & pain, death, the family and society, reproduction, mental illness, aging, human subject experimentation, the doctor-patient relationship, and humor in medicine. In exploring the topics, we will focus on questions of race and ethnicity, and we will concern ourselves primarily—but not exclusively—with African American and Latina/o writings. We will also pay close attention to how questions of gender and sexuality emerge prominently in the intersection of race, health, and art. In the process, students will have the opportunity to develop independent research projects that seek to bring together these distinct fields.

English 875: Critical Race Theory

Jennifer Ho

The subject of race continues to be one of the most enduringly divisive and controversial subjects in the United States. And even at the turn into the 21st century, despite the historic election of our first mixed-race African American president and the two terms he served, as a nation we have not developed an adequate and comfortable common ground or common language to discuss, honestly and openly, our concerns, misconceptions, questions, interests, and hopes in terms of race. This seminar will provide a theoretical, historical, and social knowledge on the subject and various discourses on race. We will additionally explore various narratives that reflect the way that Americans represent race in the U.S., especially the concept of racial hybridity, intersectionality, color blind racism, and multiracial identities. Additionally, this seminar will provide practical experience for graduate students in terms of creating lesson plans/discussions about teaching and pedagogy and writing a final research paper for a journal (and hence for potential publication).

CMPL 890: Seminar, Nation and the Transnational: Borders, (Im)Migration, Race, Ethnicity, and Gender

Alicia Rivero

How have key concepts of nation and Latin(a) American identity been defined and continue to be reworked in the cultural imaginary, as well as represented textually since the 19th Century? Why have borders and immigration become such controversial issues? In order to understand how such notions evolved, we will explore not only some of the background surrounding such controversies and their impacts, but also intersections of race, ethnicity and gender with nation and the transnational. We’ll use historical and current events, multimedia, lectures, presentations, discussions, debates, theory, as well as selected 19th and 20th century literary works as sources to see how these polemics have been defined within and without Latin America. We’ll also discuss such ideas as postcolonialism, borders/borderlands, (im)migration, diaspora, slavery, hybridity, transculturation, stereotypes, etc. Required texts (some may change due to their availability): Martí, “Nuestra América”/“Our America” (essay, coursepack); Manzano, Autobiografía de un esclavo/ Autobiography of a Slave (slave narrative, ed. Schulman); Matto de Turner, Aves sin nido/Birds without a Nest (novel); Gómez de Avellaneda, Sab/Sab (novel); Castillo, So Far from God (novel); Fuentes, La frontera de cristal/The Crystal Frontier (selected short stories, coursepack); García, Dreaming in Cuban (novel); Menchú, Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú/I, Rigoberta Menchú (testimonial narrative); Alvarez, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (novel); Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La frontera (essay, selection, coursepack). Work for the course: participation, presentation (40% of grade), and research paper (60%).