Topics in Writing & Rhetoric: Cinemas of the Borderlands: Diaspora, Identity, and Belonging

3 credits · Undergraduate

This course uses world diasporic cinema as a site for the study of cultural rhetorics and asks how filmmakers working from the margins of multiple national traditions use the formal resources of cinema to argue, resist, mourn, celebrate, and reimagine belonging. The cinema screen has historically been a place where diasporic peoples are rendered invisible, exotic, or pitiable, flattened into stereotype, made to stand in for entire nations, even completely erased. We'll examine how filmmakers from diasporic communities return the gaze: crafting nuanced, layered, multiple narratives from the between-spaces of here and there, then and now, transforming the inherited grammars of cinema into something that can meditate on exile, belonging, and transformation all at once. This course fulfills the advanced PWR requirement for the Notation in Cultural Rhetorics (NCR). For a full course description see https://pwrcourses.stanford.edu/advancedpwr/PWR194SM This class does not fulfill the WR-1 or WR-2 requirement.