In this course we will read and discuss a group of short stories written by contemporary female, queer and trans Latin American authors. These stories deal with (among other weird feelings and states) the uncanny, the unsettling and the horror of daily life as well as processes of becoming, embodiment and disidentification. This course considers the intersections of identity and imagination, race, gender, and class. Special attention is given to the way in which these writings depict oppression and resilience and how they reinvent the Latin American short story writing tradition.

This course will explore the spatiality of African descendant people in the United States and in the larger Black diaspora, rethinking power, society & culture, knowledge production, and social movement through Blackness. It enters Blackness as a mode of political identification in memoir, folklore, ethnography, speculative fiction, essay, hybrids, photographs, and maps. As a conceptual apparatus for the course, ?the imaginaire? concerns counter-canonical forms of knowledge, our daily existence, as well as our most fundamental relationships ?

Critical reading and appreciation of selections from major anthologies and authors of various poetic genres written in Classical Chinese from the Zhou dynasty to the present.