Literary Explorations of Race & Justice

Catalog description

While this course is, as the title suggests, a survey of literary texts emphasizing race and justice, an exploration like this one posits an argument about which works of a literary tradition are most important, most fundamental, and, especially, how works that are deemed “political" feature in literary traditions. How have some authors and their texts become popularized, for whom, and what are some of the consequences (both positive and negative) of how the processes (both organic and inorganic) of popularization (canonicity, if you will) establish the parameters of ethnic literary traditions? We will work with these questions as you read and respond in discussion and in writing to some of what I, and others, consider a handful of the most prominent U.S. writers of color, their works, and their representations of race and justice. Other questions that will help us explore the multiplicity and richness of these literary texts: How do these texts converse with broader traditions of literatures? What are the conversations between and tensions within these texts and among its writers? How do aesthetics, politics, and community intersect? How do issues, including race and justice, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and self-representation manifest within texts? What histories impact literary production and publication of these texts? How are these literary explorations of race and justice evolving and what does the future hold? The course will be writing-intensive, reading-intensive, and genre-inclusive, as we connect the "creative" realm of textual representation in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction to the "theoretical" realm of criticism and scholarship that provides ways for us to see and read textual representation critically, imaginatively, differently. The course promises to incite provocative discussions, as it engages the relevance of a rapidly changing U.S. population.