Reading Black and White

Catalog description

In his late nineteenth-century novel, The Tradegy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, Mark Twain described racial identity as a "fiction of law and custom." At the beginning of the twentieth century, W.E.B. Dubois claimed that race is a condition of "blood and culture." And in the late twentieth century, critics declared that American culture had become "post-racial." This course follows the conversation about Black and White racial identity from the Gilded Age, to the Harlem Renaissance, to our contemporary moment. The imaginative processes by which race is narrated and represented--through art, film, poetry, fiction, and prose--influences, sometimes even creates, the realities that we occupy. This course will trace the legacy of the minstrel show, discuss the icons of Black heroism and the politics that surround them, and explore images of Black womanhood and sexuality. Finally, we will trace the outlines of a shifting definition of whiteness, and explore the way in which narratives of guilty and crime deflect the history that frames them. Using the films of Spike Lee as a bookend for these explorations, this class will explore nineteenth and twentieth manifestations of black and white identity as they surface in twenty-first century American. WRT 101 , ENG 210 or HON 111 and PHL 110 .