26: 350: 538 Graduate Seminar: “Topics in Latinx Literature: Undocumented Subjects”

Throughout the Obama and Trump administrations, the United States government has implemented policies that foreclose or limit the possibility of immigration, asylum and refuge. Specifically, Trump proposed in July 2020 to exclude immigrants without status from calculations within the Census and has proposed to "end" all immigration and asylum. Obama's government deported over three million undocumented immigrants and the DREAM act, which granted migrants of a certain age a path to citizenship, has become tenuous. This seminar draws on recent theoretical and historical writing on nationalism, citizenship, governmentality, and state sovereignty to illuminate contemporary Latinx literary representations of undocumented migration. Necessarily interdisciplinary in scope, the seminar will address history, legal and literary scholars in addition to novels, poetry, essays, plays and a film. While our focus is Latinx literature, we will consult other accounts of migration and of violence on borders that are not merely geographical, but also define categories of race or ethnicity, sex, language, class, through centuries-old regimes of governmentality. Legal scholars and studies in indigenous, Asian-American and African-American subjection reveal a long history of defining U.S. citizenship against the non-citizen or second-class citizen, so we will read undocumented subjection of the last several decades comparatively and in this larger historical context.

To fully grapple with this body of literature, we will ask several questions about the current migration crisis: What is the after-life of state terror (both foreign and domestic), in terms of trauma for those marked by or still caught in the U.S. immigration apparatus? What is the relationship between racialized policing, the prison-industrial complex, and migrant detention? How do Latinx migrant subjects respond to, remember and narrate memories of state violence? How do gender, race, class, sex and language mediate the narration, theatricalization or poetic response to migration from the South and Central Americas, including Mexico and the Caribbean? How do gendered/sexed and racialized migrant bodies become subject to the whims of others? On another level, we will think about the relationship between migrant and ethnic traditions or national literatures: How does the literature of undocumented migration reframe national literary discourses? How do representations of undocumented migration prompt us to rethink ethnonational literary canons such as Latinx literature? How does the undocumented subject transform or delimit definitions of U.S. citizenship and culture? What genres and forms do the undocumented subject find available and/or best suited for self-representation? What geographies do undocumented subjects inhabit?