Roots and Routes: Caribbean and Latinx F

This interdisciplinary seminar explores contemporary literary fiction, visual art, and film from the Latinx and Caribbean diaspora, with a focus on how narrative and aesthetic elements such as characterization, structure, dialogue, setting, tone, and theme, shape meaning and invite new ways of seeing. Students will be encouraged to interrogate their own perspectives by examining the roots and routes of their imaginations, asking not only what they think, but why. The course will include weekly critical and creative assignments, offering students opportunities to respond with essays, sketches, micro-memoirs, and experimental reviews and stories. We will consider engaging fiction as both a political and artistic act—one that can emerge from love or violence, found objects or personal memories, autobiography or current events. Through close readings and viewings, we will challenge, and reimagine dominant narratives and the popular Latinx imaginary. Throughout the course, students will deepen their visual literacy, broaden their understanding of the historical and cultural contexts informing Latinx identities, and develop their own critical and creative voices through multimodal storytelling.