Courses
Race, Representation, and Renaissance
Course highlight and student reflections
What does it mean to fashion blackness in its own image? What is at stake in black representation? This course examines black cultural expression during the periods known as the Harlem or New Negro Renaissance and the Black Chicago Renaissance. We will examine the historical context that enabled this cultural rebirth, including World War I and II and the Great Migration; analyze the creative works produced in the era, ranging from Langston Hughes’ poetry to Bessie Smith’s blues, from Oscar Micheaux’s films to Gwendolyn Brooks’ and Zora Neale Hurston’s writings; and interrogate the representational politics set forth by producers within the movement. How and to what extent was black expression liberated in this era? How and to what extent was it policed, stifled, and constrained? These and other questions will be central to our exploration of the period.
Black Home Spaces in the U.S.
What does it mean to be at home? How do home and nation intersect? What are some of the ways African Americans have cultivated home spaces, and within what societal conditions? Using these questions and drawing from literature, geography, black feminism, and film, we will explore home space as a force and factor in shaping black identities in the U.S. As microcosms of cities and the nation, home spaces are structured by the social, economic, political, and historical landscape of a society. As places of individual and communal living and dwelling, home spaces shape and are shaped by people. To study home is necessarily to study nation, family and affective ties, gender, and built space. In the United States, slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, restrictive covenants, and gentrification have targeted and disproportionately affected black lives, communities, and home spaces. In the face of this dehumanization, devaluation, and discrimination, black people have found ways to claim, make, and obtain spaces and senses of home, whether fleeting or permanent, conceptual or concrete. Modes of homemaking serve as a lens through which to ascertain the challenges, triumphs, and banalities of black life in the U.S. throughout history.
Coming of Age, Coming to Consciousness (The Black Bildungsroman) – Senior Seminar
In this course, we will study the phenomenon of GWB: growing-up while black. To ground this semester-long study, we will explore such questions as: To what extent is childhood and adolescence shaped by race? How has the movement from childhood to adulthood been similar and different for black Americans across moments in history? What are the rites of passage in coming of age, and how do the particularities of race, gender, sexuality, and region, among other factors, impact these touchstones of life? What does it mean to “come to consciousness” as a Black person living in the U.S., and how is it intertwined with, but distinct from, coming of age? Utilizing literature and film as primary texts, we will analyze how the format and methods of our texts construct or disrupt ideas of childhood, adulthood, maturity, consciousness, failure, and success.
Race, Place, and Representation – Graduate Seminar
Atlanta. DC. New Orleans. Flint. The South. The inner city. MLK Boulevard. The Black Belt. In the U.S., there is an abundance of case studies on the racialization of place. In this course, we will interrogate processes and histories of racialization, investigate how Black artists construct narratives of fictional and actual places, and analyze the work of representation in the staying power of racial narratives associated with place and space. Course material will draw from literature, geography, housing policy, Black feminism, film, and cultural studies.
Literature and the Archive
How does the archive inspire and ground literary texts? How can literature fill out gaps in the archive? In this course, we will interrogate the complementary nature of literature and the historical archive. We will pay particular attention to the imperatives, as well as the challenges, of engaging the archive in literature, especially pertaining to silences around the experiences of Black, LGBTQIA, women-identified, and other marginalized and oppressed populations. Students will engage in both archival research and literary analysis.