This course is a study of Latinx literatures and cultures produced in the last two decades. We will concentrate our attention on how contemporary art works represent and participate in the upheavals of the twenty-first century—9/11, global economic and ecological crisis, mass migration and mass deportation, 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, shows, performance art, painting, music—and the historical antagonisms that animate them. We will investigate the cultural work these objects and their authors perform. How do they project, embrace, and constitute the conflicting meanings of Latinx life today? 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 Latina/o/x 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.