American Poetics: Inventions and Intimate Dialogues in the Making of a Hemisphere

Semester and Year	FA 2012
Course Number	IDSEM-UG1503
Section	001
Instructor	Millery Polyné
Days	Wed
Time	3:30 PM - 6:10 PM
Units	4.0
Level	U
Foundation Requirement	HUM, GLOBAL

Notes/Restrictions

Same as SCA-UA 816.

Description

The idea of an America has been diffracted but reconstituted by a number of theorists, policymakers, (forced) laborers, and artists. Each of these actors sought to craft a new existence that distinguished itself from “Old World” tyranny, particularly through the creation of imagined communities of identity (i.e. racial, political, religious or sexual). America proved to be an extraordinarily malleable idea. Yet, the narrative of “Our America” also revealed its internal contradictions and fissures within institutions and social phenomena it helped to perpetuate such as slavery, race, and empire. This course examines the cultural and political investments that have characterized the American Hemisphere. The matrix of race, class and gender has been a useful lens to analyze the systems and structures in place that both benefited and suppressed American peoples and their contributions to the construction of America. Yet, the themes of migration, exile, nationalism, sexuality, creolization, and empire-building also serve as essential tools to untangling and mapping the roots and routes of American development. Through a diverse set of materials (primary documents, secondary readings, films, music, and art) that utilize a multimedia and interdisciplinary approach to a range of anthropological, historical, literary, political and economic questions central to American experience(s), this course will critically engage the writings of thinkers (José Martí Walter Mignolo, Amy Kaplan, Toni Morrison) who have helped us better understand the spheres where Francophone, Anglophone and Hispanophone worlds collide, coalesce and interpenetrate.

Course Type

Interdisciplinary Seminars (IDSEM-UG)