Topics in Comparative Racial & Ethnic Literary Studies
Topic: Ghosts & Racial Hauntings
Class Information
Instructor: Zecena, Ruben
Time: MWF 12:10-1:00pm
Location: Hart 1130
GE Areas: American Cultures, Governance, and History Domestic Diversity Writing Experience
Description
This course explores U.S. racial formations in conjunction with haunting, thinking carefully about what ghosts, spirits, and haints, as represented in literature, might teach us about historical violences. Instead of turning away from spectral apparitions, we will read and listen carefully, lend an ear to the unspoken, see what goes unseen, and embed ourselves in the present with a sensibility for the past. The course will examine "racial hauntings" through a focus on fiction that touches on topics such as settler-colonialism, the prison industrial complex, slavery, and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.
Texts
Beloved, Toni Morrison
The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston
Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko
The Rain God, Arturo Islas
Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward