American Studies

Catalog description

This seminar will investigate narratives that depict intimate interactions between Blacks and Whites, chiefly within an idyllic setting, one conducive, that is, to issues concerned with romance. The intention is to determine the extent to which such texts inform America’s continuing angst associated with race and sexuality that may lie behind the continuing divide between Black and White Americans. Writers of interest would include Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Richard Wright, Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, and William Styron.