Writing for Racial Justice

Catalog description

Writing has played a central role in racial justice activism, movements, and advocacy throughout history. In the United States, figures such as Frederick Douglas, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, Sheryl Lightfoot, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and others, have employed writing to share and affirm truths, rewrite/correct histories and futures, reveal hypocrisies, cultivate identity, build community, and imagine liberated futures. Building on this legacy and these themes, a new intersectional movement of racial justice writers/activists has adopted emergent forms of writing, composition, and invention to address present-day injustices and to speculate on better possible worlds. In this course, students will be invited to join these scholarly and activist conversations through a range of different approaches which may include: learning key vocabulary, analyzing texts, exploring critical frameworks and historical contexts, reflecting on ethics and positionality, engaging case studies, and practicing forms of writing and composition that are consistent with racial justice literatures. Students will learn tools and perspectives in rhetorical invention and genre awareness, effective writing and composition practices for anti-racist, experimental, speculative, and multimodal approaches, and effective drafting, revision, and workshopping strategies, while positioning themselves as intellectual leaders and agents of change.