English 472.572: Mapping Minority Women's Literature

Course Description
This course will explore contemporary American cultural narratives written by women of color and the experiences that have shaped their lives.  Themes include growing from girlhood to womanhood; love and sexuality; race, class, and social justice; feminism, family, and women's traditions.  The course's structure will follow Lucy Lippard's chapter titles from Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America: "Naming" is about self-naming and being labeled, about coming to terms with self-representation, despite the shape-shifting identities most of us are forced to assume; "Telling" is about history, family, religion, and storytelling.  Telling looks back to where the intercultural process began weighing the burdens of the past on the present; "Landing" is about roots and points of departure, about taking place and being displaced; "Mixing" is about mestizaje, or miscegenation—the double-aged past of rape and colonization, the double-edged future of a new and freely mixed world.  Graduate students will be assigned teaching days, an article-length paper, and a book review; undergraduate students will be assigned 4, four-page papers after each section and a comprehensive final exam.

Linda Hogan, Woman Who Watches Over the World
Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men
Cherrie Moraga, Loving in the War Years
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
Sandra Cisneros, House on Mango Street
Ana Castillo, So Far from God