{"id":19661,"date":"2012-01-08T10:12:27","date_gmt":"2012-01-08T10:12:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=19661"},"modified":"2014-01-16T15:40:11","modified_gmt":"2014-01-16T15:40:11","slug":"enlt-252-mestizas-halfies-and-others","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=19661","title":{"rendered":"ENLT 252 Mestizas, Halfies, and Others"},"content":{"rendered":"

ENLT 252 Mestizas, Halfies, and Others<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

University of Virginia
\nFall 2008<\/p>\n

How does your family background affect the way that the way that you see yourself?\u00a0 How others in the United States see you?\u00a0 In this class we will investigate novels, short stories, and poems that foreground the multicultural and intercultural make-up of the United States.\u00a0 Our texts are an alternate form of cultural history: they depict a range of interactions between various immigrant communities and the larger \u201cAmerican\u201d culture, which as it turns out, has no single definition.\u00a0 Our texts are written by women who are often assigned hyphenated labels to indicate their family origins\u2014Sandra Cisneros is Mexican-American, Diana Abu-Jaber is Jordanian-American, and so on\u2014and many of our works feature protagonists who are of mixed racial and ethnic heritage and who negotiate among several different cultural modes.\u00a0 Some recurring themes of the course will be the experience of living in between two or more languages (many of the texts incorporate untranslated pieces of languages other than English) and the language act of naming and renaming (for instance in Marilyn Chin\u2019s \u201cHow I Got That Name: An Essay on Assimilation.\u201d)\u00a0 We will see that it is not only the ethically \u201cother\u201d citizens who are influenced by the American experience but indeed that their languages and voices penetrate into and profoundly shape American experience as a whole, both in terms of literary content and in terms of formal accomplishment.<\/p>\n

\u00a0In the course we will analyze literary moments of cross-cultural contact, stereotyping, and exchange, and our goal during the semester will likewise be to create a small exemplary community in which open exchanges can occur.\u00a0 We will discuss and critique the terms \u201cmestiza\u201d and \u201chalfie,\u201d among other labels for people of mixed race and mixed cultural experience, and we will compare the use and implications of these colloquial terms to the purposes and political intentions of scholarly definitions by cultural critics such as Gloria Anzald\u00faa and Lila Abu-Lughod. We will also be strongly interested in questions of literary form.\u00a0 For instance, what is significant about a novel or poem following a linear narrative characteristic of realism, in other words producing a \u201cstraight\u201d take on identity and history?\u00a0 What is at stake in the poem or novel that takes a more postmodern approach and emphasizes a fractured, heterogeneous, hybrid experience?\u00a0 Course requirements include regular and well-prepared participation, three papers, email responses to two of the readings, one class presentation, one or two periods leading discussion, and an essay-based final exam.<\/p>\n

Possible texts include:<\/p>\n

Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories<\/em> (Vintage)
\nGloria Anzald\u00faa, Borderlands\/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza<\/em> (Aunt Lute Books)
\nRichard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez<\/em> (Bantam)
\nNella Larson, Passing<\/em> (Penguin)
\nDanzy Senna<\/a>, Caucasia<\/em> (Riverhead)
\nGish Jen, Mona in the Promised Land<\/em> (Vintage)
\nDiana Abu-Jaber, Crescent<\/em> (Norton)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ENLT 252 Mestizas, Halfies, and Others University of Virginia Fall 2008 How does your family background affect the way that the way that you see yourself?\u00a0 How others in the United States see you?\u00a0 In this class we will investigate novels, short stories, and poems that foreground the multicultural and intercultural make-up of the United […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1564,1196,8,20,25],"tags":[4702],"class_list":["post-19661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-courses","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-usa","category-women","tag-university-of-virginia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19661"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19661\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}