ENGL 537 A: Topics in American Studies

Emerging from the new social movements of the U.S. 1970s and '80s, “queer of color” as a category recognizes that LGBTQ+ people exist in communities of color, just as people of color have participated in and led queer liberation struggles.  Beginning with the term’s formalization in 2004, the theoretical aim of this seminar is to provide an intellectual history of queer of color critique in the U.S. from the Combahee River Collective’s “A Black Feminist Statement” through 1990s ethnic studies and the proliferation of the term in 2000s and 2010s scholarship amidst the coinciding questioning of queer theory’s primary location in the academy.  Reading queer of color criticism in conversation with the novels, poetry, plays, and films that focus on LGBTQ+ people of color that have expanded its theoretical imagination, this seminar will analyze how constructions of race operate through sexuality, as well as how our collective understandings of sex and sexuality carry racialized meanings.  Key issues will include race and empire, migration and displacement, history and memory, intimacies and segregation, and love and kinship.  We will ask after the political function of art and the social function of criticism.  Authors and theorists may include James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Ricardo Bracho, Roderick Ferguson, Jose Munoz, Jasbir Puar, Tommy Pico, Emma Perez, and Ocean Vuong.  Assessments will be designed toward professionalization, and the quarter will culminate with the submission of an original conference presentation-length research paper.

Keywords: U.S. multiethnic literary studies, American studies, queer theory, critical ethnic studies.