ENGLISH 335: Bilingual Loyalties

Course Description

This course explores how multilingualism offers a fraught but important pathway into ethnic American literature. Controversies over phrases like "mother tongue," "native speaker," and "bilingual education," reflect the deep ideological investment people bring to issues of language. The writing and reading of multilingual literature taps into these investments, and elucidate a range of strategies to navigate mainstream American expectations and participating in global circulations of literary production. We read works from outside the US in addition to works within ethnic studies.