Blk Cen Amer Lit, Art, Dias

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course explores Black Central American cultural production, including literary, visual, and multimedia texts, as a transnational archive of memory, resistance, and belonging. From poetry, fiction, and memoir to photography, film, and visual art, Afro-descendant and Afro-Indigenous creators from Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama contest racialized geographies, colonial legacies, and nationalist exclusions. Their work engages themes of gender, language, land, migration, and cultural survival, often written, imaged, or filmed in relation to the Caribbean Coast, a region long positioned as a racialized periphery in the Central American imaginary. By reading literature alongside visual art, film, photography, and performance, students will consider how these works circulate across borders and illuminate the complexities of displacement, survival, and belonging in the Americas. Primary texts will be paired with critical works in Black feminist theory, diaspora studies, and cultural histories of Black Central America, framing cultural production not only as regional expression but as a hemispheric and world-making practice.