Honors Collegium 138
Empire, Bordercrossing and Multiethnic Storytelling
Enrollment: Open to College Honors/College Scholars students; Juniors and above; This course is recommended specifically for Juniors and Seniors who have taken at least one course in Area Studies (African American, Asian American, Chicanx or Latinx Studies, Mideastern Studies, Womens, Gender or LGBTQ+ Studies) or Ethnic Studies or Postcolonial or Transnational Literature.
Course Description: Exploration of theoretical evolution of postcolonial and transnational studies through predominantly American multiethnic literature. How do our primary works of fiction or creative nonfiction question literary conventions of allegedly mainstream, white Euro-American literature? What manifestations of empire, diasporic mobility, and generic mutability unite or separate our primary creative works? What meditations on identity and intersectionality do our primary texts offer as they intersect notions of race, class, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and/or sexuality? What aesthetic or critical possibilities does multiethnic American literature open up for future of postcolonial and diaspora studies? Close reading of fiction and creative non-fiction by Sandra Cisneros, Louise Erdrich, Jhumpa Lahiri, Justin Torres, Cathy Park Hong, Laila Lalami, Camille Dungy, and Melissa Febos, along with several other secondary critical essays.
Namrata Poddar
Namrata Poddar writes fiction, nonfiction, and serves as Interviews Editor for Kweli journal where she curates a series called “Race, Power and Storytelling.” Since two decades, her work has been exploring the intersection of storytelling, race, class, gender, place and/or migration. Her scholarlship on postcolonial islands and stories of global travel, empire, environmentalism and tourism has been published in various anthologies on the Caribbean, the Pacific and the Indian Ocean. Her creative nonfiction has explored ways in which contemporary multiethnic literature decenters white, male and/or western aesthetic assumptions in both literary and popular storytelling while her fiction explores the lives of a transnational brown community of Asian descent. Her creative writing has appeared in Longreads, Literary Hub, The Los Angeles Times, Transition, The Kenyon Review, Poets & Writers, Electric Literature, The Margins, The Progressive, CounterPunch, VIDA Review, Necessary Fiction, The Caravan, and elsewhere. Her short stories have won the first prize at the contest organized by 14th international short story conference and the New Asian Writing Prize; featured in The Best Asian Short Stories anthology, and placed as a semi-finalist for American Short Fiction’s Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize. Her debut novel’s manuscript was a finalist for Feminist Press’s Louise Meriwether First Book Prize, longlisted for C&R Press Book Award and a semi-finalist for Black Lawrence Press’s The Big Moose Prize; it’s scheduled to release from 7.13 Books in Spring 2022.
Q & A
What is your home department at UCLA? None at this point (English was my previous one)
How long have you been teaching your HC seminar? Have offered it twice for the Honors Collegium and traught it several times for the English department at UCLA.
What is your favorite part about teaching this HC seminar? The topic of the course itself and the students from diverse backgrounds.
What do you find to be the most compelling about the subject matter of this seminar? How the most lethal violence across the planet can be effected through words or a seemingly inconsequential power of the pen.
What are the learning objectives for this course?
- Students will gain a deeper understanding of multiethnic American literature and its relationship to ongoing concerns of social justice including representation, power, privilege and intersectional identity via questions of race, class, gender, sexual identity, migration and literary forms.
- In addition to looking at language and learning to read closely a creative work, students will also gain an introductory understanding to specific schools of critical thought in the Humanities like postcolonialism, transnationalism, globalization or feminism, and a broader sense of where American literature stands within a local and global landscape today.