Who Is This America?

In a time of a resurgent nationalism throughout
Western countries, rooted in expressions of
racial and ethnic exclusion, this will be a
laboratory for projects that take up questions of
national identity, the state and globalization -
including the manufacture, erasure and recovery
of histories and epistemologies
(beliefs/knowledge); the drawing and crossing of
borders; the construction of identity and
critiques of ethnic and racial purity; the
freedom of movement, ideas, culture, language and
relationship, and how this differs for ordinary
people versus capital; and current anti-racist
work and coalition building taking place in Los
Angeles. Key questions will ask what is the
difference between racial and ethnic nationalisms
versus the figure of "the nation" as a powerful
part of anti-colonial imaginaries? Or how does
the dissolution of the nation state posed by
globalization both open new possibilities of
being while simultaneously further eroding our
access to power? To guide our work, we will
examine others' works on these ideas, including
works by Winona LaDuke, WEB DeBois, Gloria
Anzalda, Benedict Anderson, Antibalas, Guillermo
Gomez Pena, Jose Munoz, Jessica Hagedorn, Franz
Fanon, the Center for Art on Migration Politics
(Copenhagen), Jared Sexton, Walter Mignolo,
Anibal Quijano, Kidlat Tahimik, Junot Diaz, Vine
Deloria, Edwidge Danticat, Emily Jacir, Allan
Sekula, Deborah Bright, Ant Farm, Ricardo
Dominguez and Electronic Disturbance Theater,
Stuart Hall, Alex Rivera, Paul Gilroy, Edward
Said, Arjun Appadurai, Beatriz Santiago Munoz,
and anti-deportation activism in the US, from the
Sanctuary City movement of the 1980s to the
versions offered by cities and universities
today. Open to the Institute, BFA and MFA levels.