Literature and Ethnicity
- GEN Race, Ethnicity, and Gender Diversity
- GEN Literary, Visual, and Performing Arts
- GEL Social Diversity in the U.S.
- GEL Literature
- Tuesdays and Thursdays 11:10-12:30pm, Mendenhall 185
- John Brooks
This course examines literary representations of ethnicity refracted through experiences of racialization and gender in an American cultural context.
How are people belonging to various sub-cultural ethnic groups construed as alien “others” by dominant cultures?
How do language, narrative, and creative expression allow writers from diverse ethnic backgrounds to construct a sense of self that resists such othering?
This section of “Literature and Ethnicity” focuses on representations of belonging and alienation in the works of American ethnic writers.
Across all writing and presentation assignments, we will focus on the myriad ways that authors describe their changing senses of self in racialized, gendered, and intersectional terms.
As we will see, ideas of identity and otherness are fraught with questions and complications—what it means to belong in America has been defined and redefined, often meaning different things to different groups of people at different times.
Making sense of one’s identity as an American thus involves coming to terms with competing ideas about ethnic, racial, and gender performances, but also reckoning with the alienation that such identities produce.
