Intro to English III: Latinx Literature

Emerging from the demographic, political, and cultural shifts of the late twentieth century, LatinX Literature flourishes in the twenty-first century as a hemispherically American corpus of texts. Like both ChicanX and Puerto Rican literatures before it, LatinX Literature emerges from various movements for social justice to challenge both the Anglo and the Hispanic established literary traditions of the Americas. As a transnational, pluralistic, heterogeneous, and dynamic category that considers the writings of diverse peoples with cultural ties to Latin America residing in the U.S., it complicates and transgresses the linguistic, geopolitical and cultural borders of the Americas, including those of the Afro-Caribbean, Luso-Brazilian, and the Native First Nations. Aligning itself with the issues, styles, and topics of the Global South, LatinX Literature is a product of the kind of 'border thinking' that critic Walter Mignolo has described as a 'pluriversal epistemology that interconnects the plurality and diversity of decolonial projects.' Acknowledging its emergence from literal and theoretical border spaces and decolonizing epistemologies, the 'X' of LatinX intentionally inflects the link to an origin in LGBTQI discourses signifying 'a more inclusive, non-gender-binary designation for LatinX peoples' and as a border literature that articulates heterogeneous ways of making meaning. Authors may include Jesus Colón, Sandra Cisneros, Helena Maria Viramontes, Christina Garcia, Junot Diaz, Ire´ne Lara Silva, Julia Alvarez, Américo Paredes, Daniel Alarcón, Francisco Goldman, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Tato Laviera, Ernesto Quinonez, Erika Sanchez, Elizabeth Acevedo, Luis Valdez, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Fernando Flores, or Oscar Cásares. NOTE: English majors must take this class for 5 units.