01   TTH5  CAC  73054  EVANS  SC-205

This class explores writing by black Americans during the period of slavery, the Civil War, and its aftermath. This material demands attention not just for its subject, but also for how it troubles commonly held ideas about reading itself. We will be studying texts ranging across familiar genres, including poetry, autobiography, political tracts and speeches, folklore, short stories and novels. These texts can help us infer something about American history that we cannot get in other ways, namely the subjective experience of slavery and segregation. But they also help us understand something about reading, namely its historical and cultural contingency. During the semester, we will work to understand how the history of this writing animates many of the cultural controversies of the present. These include debates about inclusion and exclusion in the literary cannon, as well as about how to understand the historical contradictions in the formation of American democracy and the discourse of liberty.

We will be reading work from black writers like Equiano, Wheatley, Douglass, Jacobs, Harper, Chesnutt and Du Bois, as well as by white writers like Jefferson, Melville and Twain. We will use this reading as an opportunity to raise questions about the conservation of the material past, the construction of literary archives, and the transmission of cultural memory.

Please note that there will be a historical research project for this class.  Students will need to be able to access the Alexander Library for work in Special Collections.