01 TTH7 C/D 30336 BUSIA CDL-109
This course reads and discusses Black Literature of the 1920s and 1930s in the context of American and African-American social and cultural history. Located in time between “The Great Migration” and “The Great Depression” this literary and cultural movement was at one and the same time an invention of its time and a reflection of those times. What history inspired the aesthetics? What politics shaped the poetry? Through reading essays, speeches, poetry, plays and fiction, and watching documentary films about the period and its people, we will try to come to some understanding of the social ethos against which the artists were working, and an appreciation of their legacy.
Primary Texts Will Include
W.E.B. Dubois: The Souls of Black Folk
“Criteria of Negro Art”
Arthur Schomburg: “The Negro Digs Up His Past"
Alain Locke: “The New Negro”
James Weldon Johnson: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man;
“Preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry;, “The Creation”
George Schuyler: “The Negro Art Hokum”
Jean Toomer: Selections from Cane
Wallace Thurman, editor, Fire*
Sterling Brown: Selected Poems
Langston Hughes: “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”; Selected Poems
Zora Neale Hurston: Selected Essays
“Color Struck” [A Play, from Fire]*
Nella Larsen: Quicksand
Dorothy West: The Richer, The Poorer*
Films May Include
The New Negro Arts Movement
W.E.B. Dubois A Biography in Four Voices
Langston Hughes’ Dream Harlem
Princess Tam Tam
Dorothy West, Harlem: As I Remember It
Unless Otherwise Indicated*, All Works Are Selected From the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, 2nd Edition
Course Requirements
1. READING THE REQUIRED TEXTS and active participation in Class Discussion.
2. A Choice of 2 Short Papers out of 4
3. Final Project
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