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Be/longings: Cinema and the Immigrant Experience in America – Be/Longings: Cinema and the Immigrant Experience in California
140AC 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. The first half of the course investigates the complex geographies and temporalities of migrant transit and dwelling. Course texts describe the anthropology and cultural geography of border, city, and workplace; course films map them as sites of frustrated mobility, fractured identity, and fascinating connection. The second half of the course explores 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.