-
Be/longings: Cinema and the Immigrant Experience in America – Be/Longings: Cinema and the Immigrant Experience in California
170AC 001 | CCN: 14302
Location: Dwinelle 188
Date and Time: TU, W, TH 1:00pm - 4:59pm
4 Units
This course examines contemporary scholarship and films about the migrant or immigrant experience in the US, with a focus on how they visualize and narrativize the idea of belonging. Our first week will be an “orientation” week in which we’ll reflect on our situatedness, our states of mind, and our strategies for pursuing the course. During weeks 2-5, we’ll explore the complex geographies and temporalities of migrant transit and dwelling and the many forms of between-ness experienced by immigrants through intergenerational or transnational family conflicts; those displaced by war, the slave trade, or the Holocaust; and those confronting the relationship between personal and geopolitical histories of displacement. Course texts address liminality and cultural hybridity, the challenge of memory and forgetting, and the richly critical desire for a relationship with one’s homeland. Course films represent a variety of perspectives on the immigrant experience, dramatizing and documenting migration from Africa, Latin America, and Asia.
Film 170AC fulfills the American Cultures requirement.