Latino/a Literature in the Classroom - Twenty-first-century approaches to teaching (Paperback)

The first guide to teaching Latino/a literature, "Latino/a Literature in the Classroom "provides tools for teaching one of the most rapidly growing areas of literary study. Essays by established scholars offer a comprehensive approach, attending to how formal techniques give idiosyncratic and particular shape to literature by and about Latinos/as. Accessible to different levels of instruction and utilizing an array of approaches, chapters focus on the teaching of the novel, short story, graphic novel, film, plays, poetry, and performance art in a variety of established and emerging storytelling shapes: postmodernism, magical realism, science fiction, young adult and children s fiction, and others. They consider the importance of historical period and region in the making and consuming of Latino/a literature, covering both popular and undervisited authors.

The essays will help teachers create courses that pay attention to:

Issues of form such as style, voice, perspective

Issues of content such as theme and character

Issues of histories of dislocation and settlement

Issues of socio-economic push and pull factors in the rural and urban relocation

of Latinos/as

Issues of linguistic, cultural, and ancestral difference

Contributors place key texts of the Latino/a teaching canon in dialogue with trends of a hemispheric, postcolonial, and transnational nature. Acknowledging the contexts of literatures from Mexico, Cuba, Dominica, Puerto Rico, and Central and South America, "Latino/a Literature in the Classroom "situates the teaching of Latino/a Literature within global theoretical paradigms and the broader humanities curriculum. This valuable collection of teaching methods will be useful to instructors and scholars seeking sources for intercultural and transnational literary courses.