From January 7th to 18th the Department of American Literature will host Debra Castillo, Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow and Professor of Romance Studies and Comparative Literature at Cornell University, who will teach a mini-course on Latino/a literature (the literature of Hispanic Americans) and give two lectures on the literature and culture of the Americas.

Professor Castillo specializes in contemporary narrative from the Americas, women’s studies, and postcolonial literary theory. She is the author of several books, most recently Redreaming America: Toward a Bilingual American Culture (SUNY Press, 2005).

The mini-course, which is an overview of Latino/a literature in four main genres, is open to M.A., Ph.D., and advanced B.A. students. Students from outside of IFA are welcome. The seminars are designed as an introduction, so no prior knowledge of Latino/a literature is expected of participants. PDF files of reading assignments can be downloaded from this page. Advance enrollment is not required but advisable – contact Dr. Magdalena Zapędowska at magzap@wa.amu.edu.pl

Tuesday, January 8

4:45-6:15, room 2A

Poetry: Lorna Dee Cervantes and Willy Perdomo

download materials by Lorna Dee Cervantes in pdf

download materials by Willy Perdomo in pdf

Thursday, January 10

4:45-6:15, room 103A

Drama: Luis Valdez and Guillermo Gomez Pena

download materials by Guillermo Gomez Pena in pdf

download materials by Luis Valdez in pdf (part one)

download materials by Luis Valdez in pdf (part two)

Monday, January 14

4:45-6:15, room 103A

Narrative: Sandra Cisneros and Cristina Garcia

download materials by Sandra Cisneros in pdf

download materials by Christina Garcia in pdf

Wednesday, January 16
4:45-6.15, room 202A

Nonfiction: Gloria Anzaldua and Richard Rodriguez

download materials by Gloria Anzaldua in pdf

download materials by Richard Rodriguez in pdf

Lectures:

Friday, January 11

11:30-1 pm, room 601A

Transamericans: I call it New Orleans

Cristina Rivera Garza--along with fellow turn-of-the-millenium transnational writers like Juvenal Acosta and Anna Kazumi Stahl, who make even more prominent reference to this U.S. port city--use "New Orleans" as a placeholder to anchor a theory and practice of writing that goes beyond the thematic in transcending national boundaries. Their works are one way of figuring the impact of globalization in the cultural realm, and their literary allusions to New Orleans (rather than, say, New York, Los Angeles, or Miami-three other highly figurative U.S. cities in the international imagination) offers a particular nuance to their take on this diasporic imaginary. In the background of all these novels are questions related to a plural identity, a multilingual and multicultural background, a vexed sexuality, and a fluid cartography: What does it mean to be Mexican in the U.S.? Argentine and Japanese? Male ventriloquized through a female narrative ethos? What the trope of "New Orleans" adds to this mix, this leaky, elliptic drift, is very much in accord with that city's most engrained stereotypes: tropical, murderous, poor (aristocratic), exotic (Latin, feminine), erotic (incestuous, African).

Tuesday, January 15

5:30-7, Instytut Historii, room 118

Impossible Indian

The Indian is an impossible subject partly because in familiar occidental discourse s/he cannot be not an autonomous subject at all, but rather a marker for a certain kind of distanced and exotic collective. I will explore this issue through reference to three cases: the EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) in Mexico, the Mapuche in Chile, and the indigenous-identified Chicana in the US. I mean "impossible" in two senses, both in the frequently heard connotation as stubborn or refractory-"he's just impossible to deal with"-and in the more literal sense, and it is this latter sense that will be more useful for thinking about the indigenous individual with respect to the question of autonomy. "The Indian," in brief, marks the place of that cultural collective and cannot sustain concentrated analysis without falling into ambiguity. Together these two terms-- Impossible Indian"-trace that quality which, within dominant culture reflections, cannot be accounted for by previous accounts such as those of el indio manso (poor, victimized), el indio heroico (laudatory but safely dead), el indio permitido (bearing limited rights), or el indio falso (acculturated or assimilated).