English 2610: Cultural Borderlands

Summer 2020 online course

Course materials:
Read:
 There, There by Tommy Orange
 Viet Thanh Nguyen, "Black-eyed Women"
 Paula Rothenberg, "Complicating Questions of Identity: Race, Ethnicity, and
Immigration”
 Two Poems (Links to an external site.): "Long are the Shadows" and "Shoe of Blood"
(Links to an external site.) by Najib George Awad and translated by Mohammad Kadala
 "How to Talk to Each Other When There's Little Common Ground" (Links to an external
site.) by Tommy Orange
 Re-examining the Rhetoric of the "Cultural Border" by Heewon Chang
 The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders as the New Frontier by Maria P.P. Root
Listen:
 “There, There” by Radiohead
 "Viet Thanh Nguyen: The Refugees"
 The Unheard Stories of the 'Urban Indian'"
Watch:
 Syria: Seven Years of War Explained
 Danez Smith: Dinosaurs in the hood
 Newsy: The dark history of Native Americans
 Is social media erasing the borders between cultures?: Tim Richardson at TEDxUHasselt
 Michael Todd: Crossing the Cultural Border
 Samantha Tierney: Cultural borderland
 ThirdWorldThirdspace: Borderlands/LaFrontera
 Tedx Talks: Moving Beyond the Chicano Borderlands

Course description:

The term “Cultural Borderlands” suggestively evokes contact, transition, and the
entanglement of central and peripheral discourses and forms of thought, while also
bringing to mind the now widely circulated cultural autobiography of the Chicana writer
Gloria Anzaldua Borderlands/LaFrontera (1987). Following Anzaldua’s distinction
between the border (line or demarcation) and the borderlands (place of cultural
encounter), Literature and ethnicity in the Cultural Borderlands contests grand narratives
and proposes alternative ones that defy national histories.
You will identify how cultural identity aid or limit people in understanding and
advancing themselves? This course asks students to think and write about cultural
identity alongside writers, critics, and other scholars whose work we will read, discuss,
debate with, and even advise. We will consider how much cultural identity consists of
memory and imagination and how much is based on history; we will test sociological
studies that connect cultural values to categories of race and class; and we’ll enter the
debate on identity politics, i.e., groups of people connected by a certain identity fighting
social and legal battles against discrimination. In this way, we will see how cultural
identity a frame for scholars across various academic disciplines has been. We will read
and analyze memoirs, essays, and articles by authors from diverse cultural backgrounds
that will lead to our discussions

The texts in this section give students the opportunity to look at how various European
writers made sense of, explained, and justified the results of their encounters with Native
American cultures; and to re-examine the various cultural myths of "discovery,"
"exploration," and "colonization" that students bring to class. To what extent, for
example, does the Columbus of his journals match the Columbus of history books,
movies, and even cartoons? Students can use their experiences reading Native American
texts to discuss questions of what the Europeans could and could not see in indigenous
cultures (for example, the belief expressed in Columbus's journals that the natives he met
had no religion), of what they found "strange," of how they fit native peoples into their
own stories about a "new world" of "noble savages" and "blood-thirsty heathens."
The diversity of texts in this section also allows for the consideration of the diversity of
European responses, from Columbus's cultural blindness and assumption of superiority to
Samuel Purchas's legalistic justification of colonization, to Cabeza de Vaca's growing
awareness (as a captive) of the complexity of Indian life and the tragic consequences of
European conquest.

The course materials chosen is meant to help you understand history and indigenous
people. hearing the stories from the mouths of them who have gone through it.

Course Learning Outcomes:

By the end of this course, students will:

Identify and interpret different literary forms: the short story, poetry, creative
nonfiction essays, and mixed forms.
Apply literary and cultural criticism, and other types of research to interpret various
literary and other cultural texts as methods for identifying different models of American
identity embodied in those texts.
Interrogate your own ideologies relating to identity: nationality, gender, race, class,
sexual orientation, religion, ability, age, appearance, cultural background, etc., and reflect
upon the ways you participate in, support, or reject dominant systems of oppression in the
U.S.
 Explain and explore how particular American literary texts represent models of
pluralism, diversity, and the concept of "unerasure"--unerasing/making visible the
histories, stories, and experiences that have been forgotten or erased in American
discourse and history
Be aware of different models of American identity embodied literary texts and other
cultural texts
Demonstrate your understanding of major movements in American literary and cultural
history and how particular historical moments affected literary and cultural movements.