The Literature and Culture of Black Power Reconsidered

Catalog description

This course reexamines the Black Power movement as a signal development in American literature and culture. We will read classics from the period with a view toward reassessing the nuances and complexities of their form and politics. At the same time, we will recover less familiar texts that complicate conventional understandings of what defines this movement. Authors include Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, John Edgar Wideman, Ernest Gaines, and Amiri Baraka.