Blood, Terror, and Belonging: Culture at American Borders

Module code: AM3020

This module examines contemporary literature and cultural artefacts emerging from and reacting to America’s border regions.

You'll engage with literary and historical representations of American borders, considering issues such as territorial expansion and sovereignty, immigration and labour, community formation and race and ethnicity, and Indigenous communities, as well as broader questions of citizenship, nationalism, hemispherism and terrorism.

You'll read texts 'originating' from and responding to both the US-Mexico and Canada-US border, as well as visual representations and artistic responses to North American borders. Alongside each primary literary text you'll read historical documents. These co-texts, whether state documents or artistic manifestos, will contextualise the primary material within border studies and North American history more broadly.