350:588

Index # - 13312

Distribution Requirement: A5, C, D

Thursday - 9:50 a.m.

MU 207

Cheryl A. Wall

African American Literature: Representing Segregation

While scholars have explored extensively the impact of slavery on the literary imagination, they are just beginning to explore the ways that segregation and its legacy informs the work of most twentieth century black writers.  From Charles Chesnutt and W.E.B. Du Bois at the turn of the last century to Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Lorraine Hansberry at its mid-point, these writers grapple with the challenge of how at once to represent and to resist the logic of segregation.  The concept of race as a fixed identity, visible in its marking and permanent in its effect, was the premise on which Jim Crow rested.   If, on the one hand, the texts in this course show how completely these writers reject that premise, they remind us as well of how pervasive the system was and how impenetrable to change it seemed.  Segregation disciplined interior as well as exterior space.  Yet there was room to resist.  Hansberry's ideal of "genuine realism," writing that encompassed "not only what is, but what is possible" captures the aesthetic to which many of these texts aspire.

But other texts, notably Invisible Man, which some describe as the penultimate novel of segregation, move beyond what Ellison saw as the limits of realism.  The course will move beyond the chronology of segregation to include texts written by authors such as Rita Dove, Charles Johnson, and Alice Walker that take a retrospective look at the era of Jim Crow and the civil rights struggle that brought it to an end.

Course Requirements

Regular participation, oral presentation, one-page thought papers, and two essays (8-10 pages)

Required Texts (may include):

James Baldwin, Blues for Mister Charlie

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition

Alice Childress, Wedding Band

Rita Dove, On the Bus With Rosa Parks

W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun

Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men

Charles Johnson, Dreamer

Randall Kenan, A Visitation of the Spirits

Martin Luther King, Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mother's Gardens

Alice Walker, Meridian

Richard Wright, Black Boy

.