Narrative, Violence, and Migration

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course examines how historical, political and cultural violence shape language, narrative, and collective and individual identities, and considers art as a form of transformational testimony. In this class, we will ask: How do writers and artists navigate the invisible restrictions placed on speech in order to translate the pain of war, forced migration, and state sanctioned violence into language? How have writers and artists productively challenged grammars of denial and the politics of erasure? How do literary and artistic practices confront the challenge of displacement, subjugation and cultural erasure by creating new sites of memory, knowledge production, and visions of reconstruction? We will read literature from Latin America, the Middle East, North Africa, China and beyond and study visual art, films and performance pieces that engage with and respond to state-sanctioned violence, document the psychic, spiritual and material consequences of displacement, and generate new visions of identity, community and nationhood in an increasingly global world.