MUSIC 4350 - [Culture and Representation in the Borderlands]

(crosslisted) AMST 4450, LSP 4350
(CA-AS) (CU-ITL)

Spring. Offered on demand. 4 credits. Letter grades only.

Co-meets with AMST 6450/LSP 7350/MUSIC 7350.

A. Madrid.

The borderlands are contact zones that could be defined geographically, politically, or even epistemologically as places where different cultures, lifestyles as well as understandings and experiences of the world meet and are constructed. Borders are highly contested sites and their representation plays a fundamental role in discourses of identity, from the national to the local and the personal. This seminar will engage a number of theoretical and ethnographic writings as well as cultural manifestations (music, films, literature, and TV shows) about the U.S.-Mexico border as well as other physical and cultural borderlands in order to contest the essentialisms that have controlled the representations of these areas and to show instead their fluidity and multi-sited nature. The seminar seeks to explore the borders as sites for opportunity and innovation in relation to transnational exchange, migration, and cultural flows.