ENGL 4635 - Art! Poetry! Power!

(crosslisted) AMST 4633, LSP 4635
(LA-AS, ALC-AS)

Spring. 4 credits. Student option grading.

E. Diaz.

This course begins in the center of the poetry, politics, and art of the 1960s and 1970s U.S. civil rights movements, but also makes connections with the poetics and visual cultures of twenty-first century activism. Does art produce political resistance? Does art produce political consciousness? How can we read a poster and a mural as text or as narrative? How does poetry perform or visualize a collective movement and political moment? By centering our study on these questions, we will move through the poster art, murals, and poems of Chicanos/as, U.S. Latinos/as, and African Americans during the 1960s and 1970s. Reading visual image, political proclamations, and spoken word poems as cultural texts, we will examine art and poetry as historical objects, as theoretical tools of consciousness raising and as critical knowledge produced by and for communities of color in the United States.