AAS 359-000: African American Lit.since1900 (Spring 2012)

Content:  Our course engages the canon of African American literature during the 20^th century.  During the semester we will investigate the relationship between literature and high art and social transformation, especially concerning topics like the migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North, the Harlem Renaissance, black American political and cultural radicalism, the Civil Rights Movement and Black Arts Movement, and the effect of neo-liberal and neo-conservative public policies on black literature. The class will pursue the multiple ideological positions tendered by the texts, that typically fluctuate along an axis between revolutionary nationalism and assimilation and racial erasure. We will regularly discuss the complex dynamics of memory, history, race, sexuality, nostalgia, social class, social caste, and national position in fiction narratives written by African Americans.

Requirements:

Two exams; two five-page papers; course notebook; class presentation

Materials: W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks; James Weldon Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Wallace Thurman,       The Blacker the Berry; Zora Neal Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, “Gilded Six Bits”; Richard Wright, Black Boy “Big Boy Leaves Home”; Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man; Ann Petry, The Narrows; James Baldwin, Going to Meet the Man, “Everybody’s Protest Novel”; Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones; Chester Himes, Cotton Comes to Harlem; Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon; Edward P. Jones, Lost in the City; Edwidge Danticat, Brother I’m Dying.