230216 Bridges and Borderlands: Chicana Writing and Border Thinking (S) (WiSe 2017/2018)

In this seminar, we will engage in Chicana literature, art, and theory. In the context of the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and 70s, Americans of Mexican descent (born and raised in the US) claimed a distinct political Chicano and Chicano identity from which they raised political questions and produced their own artefacts, literary and cultural practices, and theoretical conceptualizations. The seminar will focus particularly on the interventions (literary texts, music, film, theory) of Chicana actors like Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, Cherríe Moraga, or Gloria Anzaldúa, who addressed the border as a metaphor and simultaneously as their experience of en-genderd, racialized and sexualized hierarchies in racist and patriarchal contexts often marked by an insecure citizen status and rights. In an exemplary manner, Gloria Anzaldúa's concept of the borderland embodies the Chicana experience. Anzaldúa claims "the new mestiza" as an empowering identity and a position of agency marked by bilingualism and multiple cultural belongings, beyond binary oppositions and one-dimensional identity concepts. Against this backdrpo – and in light of current racist and sexist backlashes under the Trump administration - Chicana thinking provides a bridge between the Americas and a crucial strand of US and Latin American feminisms envisioning alternative, more inclusive and diverse forms of conviviality.

Requirements for participation, required level

Gloria Anzaldúa: Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books, 1987.
Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga (eds.): This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 1981.

Bibliography

Gloria Anzaldúa: Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books, 1987.
Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga (eds.): This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 1981.