AML 3682 Summer B 2024 - Trent

This course invites reflections on how transnational crossings shape our understanding of America and our idea of citizens and “aliens”. The word transnational highlights the movement and exchange of bodies and ideas across nation-state boundaries, but also, as Lisa Yoneyama writes, encompasses “insurgent memories, counterknowledges and inauthentic identities that exceed those boundaries” (7). Our class will take Yoneyama’s definition as a starting point in order to facilitate a more nuanced understanding of home, community, embodiment, and kinship. We will engage with a wide range of literary and cultural productions as well as theoretical scholarship that includes but is not limited to critical race theory, settler colonialism, ecocriticism, queer theory, and much more. Over the course of the “mini” semester students will produce either literary and or creative projects that chart their understanding of the themes of the course.