Course No: 350:593
Index #: 15064
Distribution Requirement: A4, B, C
Thursday - 2:00 p.m.
MU 207
Latinx Pasts
Evelyn Soto
Does the term “Latinx” and its gendered variants, “Latina” and “Latino,” make sense only in the 20th century? What does Latinx literature and culture look like if we turn the clock and our attention backward to the nineteenth century? We might find that the very concept of latinidad resists our desire for neat timelines as much as it crosses the boundaries between various nationalities, ethnicities, and histories that define Latin American descendent peoples. This course will explore these questions to understand how our present-day ideas of nation, art and literature, and social relations change when we read the past—and our present—through the lens of a Latinx nineteenth century. Our readings will proceed across a variety of genres, including historical novels, sensational fiction, political pamphlets, poetry, film and performance adaptations. This class considers early formations and imaginaries of latinidad as a set of changing entanglements between the U.S. and Latin America, conditions of freedom and slavery, as well as forms of conquest and dispossession.
Primary readings will include María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Who Would Have Thought It? (1872); Andrés Avelino de Orihuela, The Sun of Jesús Del Monte: A Cuban Antislavery Novel (1852); excerpts from Loreta Janeta Velazquez, The Woman in Battle (1876); and an array of adaptations from the nineteenth-century to the present of Joaquín Murieta (1853) by John Rollin Ridge. Our readings and discussions will be enriched by theories of “the archive” and “translation” as important methodological resources for engaging early latinidades. Critical reading will engage Jose Esteban Muñoz, The Sense of Brown (2020); Carmen Lamas, The Latino Continuum and the Nineteenth-Century Americas (2021); Bernadine Marie Hernández, Border Bodies: Racialized Sexuality, Sexual Capital, and Violence in the Nineteenth-Century Borderlands (2022); and other possible works by Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Walter Benjamin, Rodrigo Lazo, and Lawrence Venuti, among others.
While some of the assigned readings were originally published in Spanish, all assigned readings will be in English. Written assignments will entail one midterm paper of 7-8 pages and one final paper of 10-15 pages.