ENG 390AAfrican Futures Beyond Wakanda

Catalog

Black Women & Creativity (1960-1990) - Black women changed themselves and the world in the 1960s and 1970s! In this course, we will examine the work of African American feminist scholars, artists, and activists during one of the most crucially creative eras in recent history. Through an interdisciplinary approach to a diverse archive of literature, art, music, theatre, activism, and strategies of everyday self-making, students will learn how Black women created new knowledge, worldviews, identities, and visions of the future. We will examine how women such as Frances Beal, Angela Davis, Aretha Franklin, Nikki Giovanni, Grace Jones, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, the Pointer Sisters, Betye Saar, Ntozake Shange, and Carrie Mae Weems, equipped themselves and each other with new historical understandings of the intersection of racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism in Black women"s experiences, all while forging new forms of black joy, love, pleasure, power, revolutionary motherhood, and queer(ed) affinities.