01   MW8   CAC   65317   PRATER  MU-115

This is a survey course whose primary objective is to expose students to a wide breadth of readings in the pantheon of African American literature from 1930, a period known as the Harlem Renaissance, to the present. 

Over the course of the semester you will be reading a variety of key texts by African Americans whose genesis is a cultural syncretism of oral folk productions, slave narratives, speeches, dominant literary and cultural forms. You will begin by reading a few critical essays that situate theoretical debates surrounding the cultural production of African Americans. We will then move from post World War II literature, through the Black Arts Movement and into our present day. You will read across a breadth of genres: autobiography, essays, to poetry and prose, and interrogate how social matrices reflect in and through writing produced by African Americans. we will be looking at these texts with a lens focused on the effects produced by struggles with American fictions of race, class, and sex, and their intersections with categories of gender, ethnicity, and nation. To that end, we will also look at texts not written by African Americans that provide a socio-historical context for our discussions. For example, in order to understand the cultural cross fertilization occurring in the late 50s and 60s, you will need to read poetry by Allen Ginsberg along with that of Amiri Baraka.