Course Description

Fulfills Upper-Level Elective for LCS Major and Minor
Eligible for CCRES Minor

From internal and extraterritorial colonies to outsourcing and building a wall along Mexico, the US has been debating how to imagine and where to place its national borders. Territorial and corporate expansion has historically complicated where US jurisdiction and "America" begin and end. The first half of the semester deals with the making of borders and US racialization, while the second half looks at asylum issues and corporate and military presence along the border. The class looks at the different ways the US has regulated these spaces of exclusions in novels, films and scholarship. We will then ask how we begin to re-write and re-imagine “America” from these borders?