The Price of Culture, or Mythology and Ideology Behind America’s Racial Divide

Catalog description

This seminar will examine how African American texts offer a view of the many ways that Blacks have attempted to assimilate into the culture of the United States, and the variety of tactics that have been used to prevent their assimilation. These texts offer history lessons, African American inspired literary techniques, and philosophical concepts as roadmaps for the purpose of better understanding the racial divide in America. We will discuss a range of Black writers, such as the poets Phillis Wheatley, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Robert Hayden; the fiction writers, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin; and the playwrights, Lorraine Hansberry and Amiri Baraka. Secondary critical works will be included to inform our discussion of these writers and to assist with composing a final research paper.