AFAM 467 –
African American Novel II

This course examines the African American novel, its forms, and its traditions starting during the Harlem Renaissance. It follows the genre's evolution into the twenty-first 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 Renaissance heralded by Alain Locke, through the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements -and their attendant Black Arts Movement- and into the era of the Movement for Black Lives, course readings encompass a broad range of styles and genres, from realism, naturalism, and naturalist primitivism, through the experimental forms, magical realism, and "postrace aesthetics" of later times. The course invites students to think critically about the African American novel as a socially and politically engaged form, and to identify and analyze the long tradition of resistance that variously informs its development. Authors covered in the course might include major figures such as Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Wallace Thurman, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Ishmael Reed, Earnest Gaines, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, Octavia Butler, Gayle Jones, Samuel Delany, Charles Johnson, John Edgar Wideman, Colson Whitehead, and others. Still, the course gives due attention to lesser known/studied materials from the period, including graphic novels, satire, speculative fiction, performance novels, and various other experimental forms. Course readings and instruction give particular attention to how African American novels of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries variously engage social identity categories, like race, gender, class, and sexuality, and how they engage and resist various literary conventions associated with naturalism, modernism, and postmodernism. The course also traces the development of new thematic and aesthetic interests in a generation of writers whose fiction has been influenced by the explosion of interest in the graphic novel, the popularity of cultural forms such as hip hop, and the ascendancy of the digital age. Scholarly readings accompany primary texts 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. In this course, students learn how to analyze literature, do close and careful readings of texts, conduct related research, and write persuasively about literary works. Assignments and discussions are designed such that students may engage with course figures and materials within their historical milieus.