Be/longings: Cinema and the Immigrant Experience in America

4 credits · Undergraduate

This course examines contemporary scholarship and films about the migrant or immigrant experience in the US. The first half of the course investigates the complex geographies and temporalities of migrant transit and dwelling. Course texts describe the anthropology and cultural geography of border, city, and workplace; course films map them as sites of frustrated mobility, fractured identity, and fascinating connection. The second half of the course explores the many forms of between-ness experienced by immigrants through intergenerational or transnational family conflicts; those displaced by war, the slave trade, or the Holocaust; and those confronting the relationship between personal and geopolitical histories of displacement.