CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Immigration law. Haitians. Guantánamo Bay. Hispanic voters. Mexico. Temporary work permits. Cuba. Nafta. Sept. 11. The Patriot Act.
Today's news is saturated with these words, as - among other things - rebels battle in Haiti, presidential candidates jockey for pre-eminence and President Bush attempts, against considerable opposition, to overhaul the U.S. immigration system. It is quite likely that Bush and the presidential pack will continue to grapple with issues of immigration, military involvement and globalization right up to the election eight months from now.
As it happens, students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign began wrestling with some of these hot-button issues a few weeks ago in two new courses.
The new courses, both seminars for undergraduate students, are "Globalization and Its Discontents: The Case of Cuba" and "Immigration Stories."
Dara Goldman, a professor of Spanish literature in the department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, teaches the Cuba course. A specialist in 19th and 20th century Hispanic Caribbean and Latin American literatures and cultures, Goldman is writing a book about "the rhetoric of Hispanic Caribbean insularity."
Brett Kaplan, a professor of comparative and world literature, teaches the immigration-stories course. With research interests in Holocaust representation, memory and trauma, modern Jewish and immigration literature, Kaplan has just finished a book manuscript titled, "Unwanted Beauty: Aesthetic Pleasure in Holocaust Representation."
Both classes are part of a new high-profile program at Illinois, the Chancellor's Cross-Campus Initiative (CCI), which calls for the development of innovative and interdisciplinary courses that will enhance first-year students' education through greater involvement with faculty in small-class settings.
"The Humanities in a Globalizing World" is one of five broad rubrics the CCI courses are focusing on, and the one Goldman and Kaplan's courses fall under.
Given Cuba's unique journey during the last 105 years - as a colony of Spain, a territorial possession of the United States and an independent communist nation - globalization has played a "markedly different role" in that country's international relations and market systems, Goldman said.
"Now, the U.S. dollar economy in Cuba has become mainstream," she said. "The cultural impact of that can be glimpsed in many curious manifestations, such as the appearance of imitation 'brand-name' clothing and the development of state-sponsored cultural workshops designed to teach Cuban adolescents about hip-hop culture."
Goldman said her intention with the Cuba course is "to promote a greater understanding of globalization and to teach students to critically interrogate a phenomenon that we invariably witness, participate in and contribute to on a regular basis."
Toward this goal, and using literature, films, essays and newspaper articles, her class is looking at "key issues" closely associated with globalization: migration, diaspora, the changing role of political borders and transnational politics of gender and sexuality.
According to Goldman, their readings and discussions center on "how Cuban culture has contributed to, affected and/or been affected by issues of globalization." Readings include José Bell Lara's "Globalization and the Cuban Revolution" and Samuel Huntington's "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order."
For their final project, each student must create a Web page that focuses on one of the main aspects of globalization addressed in the course. They are to incorporate quotations, images and links along with their own analysis "in order to elucidate the complexities of the aspect they have chosen. In this sense, their final projects will be dialoguing with issues of globalization both through content and form," she said. Goldman is working with the campus information technologies unit to make the students' Web pages available to the local community.
In a recent class, Goldman and her students discussed globalization as a double-edged sword, where, for example, being part of a global village provides "connections - progress, 'democratic' possibilities, the flow of information, peoples, ideas, capital and commodities," she said, but also where it can be seen as a form of "cultural imperialism" that underscores the uneven benefits of production and consumption.
The class also discussed the role of media in globalization, including the extent to which television, the Internet, news and telecommunications foster interconnectedness. Several students recalled seeing a lot of American television - including CNN and old movies - while studying abroad, but never seeing comparable "cultural representations" from their host countries - Chile, Ecuador and Mexico - back home in the United States. Goldman pointed to several large studies that found that the United States exports some 44 percent of its television programming but imports only 1 percent.
Meanwhile, in her comparative literature course, Kaplan is focusing on immigration stories from diverse parts of the globe, an exercise she believes allows her students to examine the myriad aspects of immigration and exile.
According to Kaplan, contemporary visions of multiculturalism and globalization "often privilege America as the primary or exclusive locus of power and knowledge about culture." Her course explores "the intersections of globalization and immigration" to encourage students to "re-examine such America-centric and unidirectional world views."
"On the one hand," she said, "the influential participation of large numbers of immigrants from around the globe in American culture and politics challenges the idea that there is something quintessentially 'Western' about what America exports under the name of globalization. On the other hand, the stories we read in this course attest to the difficulty of moving between cultures, thereby challenging the idea that globalization has been so widespread as to erase cultural difference."
In her course, units focus on exile and memory, diverse immigrants in California and immigrant women.
The students read Gish Jen's "Typical American," about an immigrant from China; Edwidge Danticat's "Breath, Eyes, Memory," about an immigrant from Haiti; and Zohreh Sullivan's "Exiled Memories: Stories of Iranian Diaspora." Sullivan is a professor of English at Illinois, and was a guest lecturer at one of Kaplan's recent classes.
According to Kaplan, some of the more provocative questions raised by reading Sullivan's and other immigrant stories:
• How does one maintain the important traditions of the "old country" while also becoming American?
• How does one fit in when there are so many different ways of "being American?"
• While it is difficult to generalize about the complex experience of moving to this - and other - multicultural nations, are there similarities among immigrant stories from China, Germany, Haiti, India, Iran and Latin America?
"By combining historical works on immigration with fiction that both demonstrates and complicates the notion that America is a 'melting pot,' we hope to come to an understanding of how multiculturalism defines contemporary life," Kaplan said.
For their final papers, students will share their own experience of becoming an American, if relevant, or interview a friend or relative who has immigrated. They then will compare their story with the fictional works that close the course. The final project, thus, "combines literary analysis with self-reflection and oral history," and asks the students to "think critically about the ways globalization has affected them or their interlocutors' immigration stories."
In discussing their writing, Kaplan stressed the importance of targeting a narrow topic "so that you can support it." She asked her students to keep in mind the difference between observation and argument, and to use quoted material as evidence. "I want you to master the art of making an argument," she said. But she also invited them to push their creative limits. "I want you to explore your fictional poetical voice. I want to read a beautiful text."