This course invites students to explore regional and intercultural styles that inform New Mexican performative arts, such as music, literature, installation art, performance, and other forms of expressive culture to gain a better understanding of the intricacies of New Mexican culture and identities. Students are introduced to multiple disciplinary approaches such as history, literature, cultural studies, anthropology, ethnomusicology, and performance theory to better understand understanding of the ways in which the regional and transnational perspectives intersect in New Mexico. Students will participate in site-based learning opportunities through which they engage directly with local New Mexican performance artists, ethnomusicologists, singers, and composers. Together, we will analyze the complexities and multiplicities of perspectives within the New Mexican culture and challenge reductionist and monolithic viewpoints that have historically been imposed on the peoples and places of New Mexico. Students will experience deep engagement with the communities about which they are learning during a course trip to New Mexico (Covid situation permitting).

This course explores “queer” as an identity category, theoretical term, and verb as it emerges from, traverses, and transforms across the Americas. This course will focus on literary texts, performance and visual arts. Specifically, we will examine the ways that the artists and authors explored in this class confront legacies of white supremacist and heteropatriarchal social structures to both embrace “deviant” gender and sexual identities and also to confront colonial legacies.