AMST395J

The "frontier" has long been a controlling idea for U.S. national identity. A vestige of our settler colonialist past, the American frontier persists ideologically as an imagined “meeting point between savagery and civilization." This course examines the history of this concept and its role in American literary history. We trace its influence upon more recent configurations of the nation as territory—namely, discourses of “the border” and “the homeland.” Course readings include literature, law, and history from the nineteenth century through the post-9/11 era and relevant works of scholarship and critical theory. This course gives particular attention to Chicanx and Native American literatures and these traditions’ critical perspectives on the contested paradigms that lend this course its title.