Re-Imagining American Borders

Borders of all kinds in this America have been tight for a long time, and the four years of the Trump regime have shown new violent dangers in such divisions in race, ethnicity, gender and class in this country. In the inordinately difficult years of 2020-2021 as the pandemic has uncovered even more lethal created divisions via closed crossings and early deaths reflecting difference, our task in this course is to both examine how systemic inequities have been developed as part of American history and our daily life, especially as we see the pandemic effects, and to see how American artists, including novelists, poets, visual and performance artists, filmmakers, photographers and essayists, have developed approaches to examine, resist or re-create how the shards of our fractured identities may make sense to us. Films from Raoul Peck on colonialism and white supremacy in this America, Barry Jenkins and Kara Walker on slavery in visual narratives, poets Shailja Patel, Naomi Shihab Nye, Claudia Rankine, Layli Long Soldier, Janice Lobo Sapiago, Felicia Zamora, Zhenyu Yuan, from within the power of multiple languages, and Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nikole Hannah-Jones of the '1619' Project who bring US education into the story, all speak to recent art and social action. Nearby guest speakers from the newly produced Mini Museum Honoring the Black Panther Party in West Oakland, and creators of the Stanford Graphic Novel Project's visual art book with revelations on California prison conditions will also provide more vivid examples for all. Students' work for the quarter includes both written analysis and creative final projects.