Graduate Course Description

Black Literary Studies: Foundations & Emergences

Kernan, Ryan

What is Black literature—and Black culture, generally—and why do we study it? This course, while led by Evie Shockley, will be collectively taught by the majority of the department’s field specialists in Black literature and culture (Profs. Extra, Ibironke, Kernan, Mathes, Owens, Robolin, & Shockley). Our goal is to offer students who are interested in Black literature (African American, Caribbean, African, and broadly diasporic/transnational work)—whether as specialists or not—an opportunity to study some significant foundational texts and acquaint themselves with important emergent subfields, methods, and works that the faculty are engaged with presently. During the first five or six weeks of the course, we will survey some of the scholarship (produced roughly from the 1960s through the ‘90s) that helped establish the field of African American literature and situate it in relation to the literatures of Africa and other parts of the diaspora. The remainder of the semester will feature class sessions led in turn by the various faculty noted above, introducing methodologies and lines of inquiry that have developed more recently (circa 21st century) and showing how this emergent scholarship builds upon (even as it may diverge from or rethink altogether) earlier work. Subjects the course will likely take up include: genealogies of Black feminist thought; Black sound/music and Black literary studies; Black ecologies and geographies; the Black Arts Movement; oceanic studies; translation studies as an outgrowth of Black diaspora studies; Black posthumanism and speculative fiction; race and anticolonial thought; and the Black radical tradition. The course will give us the opportunity to reflect on both the kinds of questions Black literature has historically provoked for Black Studies and the kinds of research Black Studies scholars of literary and cultural work are doing now.

Examples of critical/theoretical texts under consideration for the course are: Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory”; Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; Kaiama Glover and Martin Munro, “Translating the Caribbean”; Isabel Hofmeyr, Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House; Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World; Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams; Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds; Fred Moton, In the Break; Jennifer Nash, How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory; Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism; Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”; Barbara Smith, “Towards a Black Feminist Criticism”; Cheryl Wall, Women of the Harlem Renaissance; Sylvia Wynter, “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation” and “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism.”

Evaluation: regular attendance; two short review essays (4-5 pp.); and a conference-length (8-9 pp.) paper, to be presented at an end-of-semester symposium.