All Courses

How do we make sense of the long durée of African American literary history and scholarship from Early Atlantic literature into the present? This course introduces a set of critical concerns across African American literature and theory and meditates on ongoing concerns that are core to the discipline of Black thought. Students will read interdisciplinarily and across a variety of time periods around concepts of canon and genre, identity and consciousness, music and expressivity, and representation and realism. Thinkers will include: Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Angela Davis, Hoyt Fuller, Fred Moten, etc.