Across the Kitchen Table: Reading Black and Latin American Fiction

In the United States’ post-Civil Rights era, Black and Latin American literatures saw an increase in critical and commercial attention, coinciding with the dawn of contemporary feminist movements. While the Black and Latin American literary traditions have been read as disparate due to their geographical and cultural spread, this course engages with a critical practice that proposes they should be read together. In doing so, this course turns to Black and Latin American feminisms that helps us better understand issues of race, gender, and class violence portrayed within and across these texts. 
How do major texts in each literary tradition influence culture and history? What can literature tell us about the issues Black and Latin American authors seek to address? What does it mean to foster transnational conversations about these issues? To answer these questions, we will read works including Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha (1953), Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955), Rosario Castellanos’ The Nine Guardians (1953), Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), and Itamar Vieira Junior’s Crooked Plow (2019). We will engage with Black feminist texts such as the Combahee River Collective’s “A Black Feminist Statement” (1977), Angela Davis’ Women, Race, and Class (1981), bell hooks’ Ain't I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism (1981), and work by Hortense Spillers, Cheryl Harris, and Saidiya Hartman. The transnational Latin American feminism we will read includes Latinx/Chicanx works by Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, and Norma Alarcón, and decolonial scholarship by Linda Martín Alcoff. We will look to Afrolatinx and diasporic scholarship by Lélia Gonzalez, Rita Segato, and Lorgia Garcia Peña to discuss how their work helps bridge the fields of Black and Latin American studies. Overall, we will examine Black and Latin American fictions, their contextual and thematic intersections, and we will explore the potential for solidarity between them.