This course examines the social, political, and economic history of African American women in the United States from slavery to the present. Using secondary and primary sources along with film and discussion, we will explore the varied lived experiences of African American women paying special attention to the themes of family, sexuality, labor, politics, and religion. We will examine how the simultaneity of racial and sexual oppression influence African American women’s actions. Additionally, we will consider dominant images of African American women in a historical context. While the course is primarily discussion in format, the professor will lecture when necessary. As the course is writing-intensive, papers of various lengths constitute the bulk of student assessment.

This course explains how narrow, “black and white,” ways of thinking limit our understanding of the diverse expressions of human sexuality. The course title’s double meaning also references the various ways that sexuality is socially constructed in relation to race. For example, we will explore how stereotypical beliefs about the sexuality of people of African descent persist in the United States and have been legitimized historically by various cultural discourses, social institutions, and academic fields. Course assignments will require us to rethink and challenge what we understand as “sexuality” and consider its many influences like race, gender, class that shape our emotions, needs, desires, relationships, representations, practices, and public policies. An aim of this course is to begin to make sense of the long, entangled, and inextricable relationship between race and sexuality in the United States.

This course examines the origins of the African American novel and follows the genre’s evolution into the early twentieth century, outlining the relationships among the texts that form the body of African American narrative as well as the relationships of those texts to the constantly shifting cultural and political realities surrounding their writing. From the earliest novels, written during the period of slavery, through the Reconstruction era, the nadir of Black Codes and Jim Crow Supreme Court decisions, and into the Renaissance heralded by Alain Locke and others, course readings encompass a broad range of styles and genres, from early proto-documentary modes, through the realism and naturalism of a later time. The course takes up Robert S. Levine’s claim that “the history of the early African American novel is not fixed or stable” by mapping the genre’s early history and by developing an understanding of the novel as genre according to both early African American authors and later scholars. It addresses the fact that this history continues to be updated and that some texts whether in part or in whole remain lost. Authors covered in the course might include William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass, Frank J. Webb, Julia C. Collins, Hannah Crafts, Martin Delany, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sutton Griggs, James Weldon Johnson, Oscar Micheaux, Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset, and others. Scholarly readings accompany primary texts in order to give students a sense of the critical work that has gone into and continues to go on in the study of African American literature. Course topics may include the issue of firsts; the challenges of publication and the attendant realities of early African American print cultures; questions of tradition and influence; and the political, social, religious, and philosophical aims of early African American novels. Readings and discussions also attend to questions of form, specifically regarding intertextuality and generic blurring and hybridity. The study of early African American novels necessarily includes attention to issues of race, identity, nation, diaspora, and the question of authenticity, and each is taken up in turn. Course assignments and discussions engage students in critical work that demands careful attention to both content and context in order that all students might strengthen their close reading capabilities and engage with course figures and materials within their historical milieus.

The impact of slavery on the petitions, poetry, slave narratives, autobiographies, and novels of African Americans.

ENGL 469 / AFAM 469 Slavery and the Literary Imagination (3) (US)(BA) This course meets the bachelor of arts degree requirements. ENGL 469 /AFAM 469 provides an opportunity for undergraduate students to examine African American petitions, poetry, slave narratives, autobiographies, and novels as literary reconstructions of the economics, politics, ethics, and poetics of slavery. Authors under consideration will vary from class to class, but may include writers such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, Phillis Wheatley, F. Harper, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Sterling Brown, Booker T. Washington, Harriet Jacobs, W. W. Brown, Harriet Wilson, Margaret Walker, Arna Bontemps, D. Bradley, S. A. Williams, Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, and Charles Johnson. The course will focus on the complex relationship of slavery to the literary imagination of Americans of African descent as they increasingly discovered the limitations and possibilities of reading and writing themselves into freedom, literacy, and wholeness as human beings and American citizens. Topics covered will vary, but will include issues of the legacy of slavery in the west; the political aims and rhetorical conventions of African American autobiography; the myths and realities of slavery; economic, political, ethical, and aesthetic issues of the representation of slavery; understandings of Black consciousness and Black culture on the road from slavery to freedom; the rise of African American realism as a response to the legacy of slavery; Black Feminism and issues of slavery; the role of history and memory in the construction of slavery; post-modern configurations of slavery; and the like. This class will prepare students for advanced courses in African American literature, as well as other academic courses that engage in the verbal and written analysis of complex written forms.