African American Literary Tradition

Catalog description

This survey course examines the development of African American literature from the late eighteenth century to the present, with a focus on issues of literacy, authority, and identity. The course traces this tradition's history from Phillis Wheatley's role in defining American poetry and Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative, to the narratives of enslavement by authors such as Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass, to the New Negro Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement, and contemporary African American fiction and poetry.