- Writing Black/Writing Back

Catalog description

A survey of African American literature from the 1700s to the present. We will examine the uneasy relationship between race and writing, with a particular focus on how representations of gender and sexuality participate in a literary construction of race. Though this course examines African American literary self‑representations, we will keep in mind how these representations respond to and interact with the “majority culture’s” efforts to define race in a different set of terms. We will focus throughout on literature as a site where this struggle over definition takes place—where African American writers have re-appropriated and revised words and ideas that had been used to exclude them from both American literary history and America itself.