Blackness & Identity in Nonfiction

Catalog description

This workshop explores how race, specifically negative concepts of blackness engrained in American history and culture, has shaped the work of nonfiction writers who struggle with the fundamental concept of self and establishing the validity of their own stories and experience. Through film, readings, discussion and writing exercises, students will analyze how racial oppression-slavery, Jim Crow,etc.-was at its core a negation of a valid black self and authoritative black voice. Students will also examine the fluidity between social and individual black reality, and how this fluidity has been consistently reflected and addressed in works from Frederick Douglass to Maya Angelou to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.