The Past is Always Tense: Contemporary African-American Literature

Catalog description

This course explores the emergence of a distinctly Black modernist and post-modernist literary discourse in fiction, poetry, drama, and criticism published from the middle of the twentieth century to the present, often in response to and in conversation with contemporaneous Anglo-American literary movements and trends. We will investigate African American writers’ engagement with the “Wright School of Social Protest”; the evolution of the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic Movements of the 1960s and 1970s; the emergence of Black feminist literature, criticism, and theory in the 1970s and 1980s; and the so-called “third renaissance” of the 1990s and 2000s. (Pre-requisite: ENGL210 for English majors, or ENGL101 or ENGL110 for non-English majors)