Professor: Marcel Brousseau

4 credits

In this class we will examine national borders as longstanding settings for narratives of crime and criminality. Political scientist Peter Andreas argues that the environment of historic conquest, transcultural comingling, and legal enforcement in borderlands regions seems to “create the very conditions” for events of crime and policing. Engaging in comparative literary area studies of both the U.S.-Mexico and the U.S.-Canada borderlands, we will interrogate the political and cultural meanings of criminality and we will trace how the form and content of border crime writing has evolved over roughly a century. Our primary goal is to increase our understanding and appreciation of border culture as it is produced through acts of writing and reading, particularly by Indigenous and Latinx authors responding to the impositions of colonial nation-state boundaries. We also seek to comprehend how authors, artists, and filmmakers experiment with meanings of legality and illegality, how they examine different subject positions relative to state power, and how they diagram relationships in terms of place, nation, culture, gender, race, and the law. In order to refine their analyses of criminality, literature, film, and historiography, students will construct an analytical dossier about the borderlands using multiple research methods.