HL90 FR: Latinx, 1492 to 2022

We have new HL90s this semester! Tommy Conners is teaching “Latinx, 1492 to 2022” this spring, Tuesday 9:45-11:45.

What ideas do you want the class to dig into?

Is latinidad cancelled? In 2018, Afroindigenous poet and artist Alán Peláez López declared it was, calling out the concept’s attachments to whiteness at the expense of Blackness and indigeneity. This class will explore the long history of how latinidad got to the edge of cancellation, whether or not its investments in cis-heterosexuality are also cause for cancelling, and the many stakes and implications cancellation puts into play.

We heard the class is going to have a visitor?

Yes! Alán Peláez López will join to lead us in a workshop about the racial, sexual, and gendered formations that sustain latinidad!! We will also visit their never-before-seen art exhibit, “N[eg]ation,” at the Smith Center Arts Wing. 

What do you want students to take away from the class?

Driving this class will be an evaluation of cancel culture across time and space: from the 15th century to present day, from the Hispanic Caribbean to the US-Mexico borderlands. We’ll read the hi/stories of Garifuna writers based in the Bronx, Guatemalan refugees in LA, and trans Chilean women in New York. We’ll think alongside theorists of queerness, decoloniality, and comparative race studies. We’ll practice analyzing people and things, subjects and objects, and develop our own methodologies along the way. Our work will engage the polemic, the historical, and the cultural to make better sense of the hemispheric social landscape we inhabit today. 

How can students learn more?

You can see the syllabus on the Canvas page or send me an email!