• This course is a study of Latinx literatures and cultures produced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will concentrate our attention on works by Chicanos, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, and Dominican Americans. We will consider how these works represent and participate in the upheavals that characterize the period—from economic crisis, revolution, decolonization, and mass migration, to political and social mobilization, state repression, neoliberalization, border conflict, and the transformation of mass media. We will examine specific literary and cultural objects—novels, poems, plays, films, music—and their reception histories. We will investigate the cultural work these objects and their authors perform. How do they project, embrace, and constitute the meanings of Latinx literature and culture? How do they contravene, suppress, or refuse certain fantasies of the “Latin”? We will address questions about race and racialization, gender and sexuality, and assimilation and transculturation, as well as about the politics of Spanglish and Spanish and the situation of Latinx artists in the global marketplace. We will conclude by looking at several works by Latin American artists that consider these questions from “beyond” the United States—that is, from outside of the political borders of the U.S., and from the margins of the canon and the culture industry.