ENGL 7760 American Literature and Culture
Learning the Souls of Back Folk
1:00–3:40 F
Cedrick May
This class will begin with the literary works of Jupiter Hammon and continue through early African American texts (those written roughly between 1760 and 1840) focusing mainly on the religious and theological aspects of the early literature within the tradition. We will study the religious context of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America and England, and examine how Africans and their descendants resisted, adopted, changed, and used religion as a source of inspiration in everyday life as a means to resist social and political oppression. In this effort, we will read several early British and British-American theologians, like Cotton Mather, George Whitefield, John Wesley, and Jonathan Edwards, alongside Black writers and theologians such as Jupiter Hammon, Phillis Wheatley, John Marrant, Richard Allen, and Maria Stewart. By reading these Black writers, and many more, we will work out how Africans and their descendants in British North America incorporated unique forms of African American Christianity into the literature and culture of the era, setting the precedent for future writings within the tradition. We will also read a number of theoretical essays on Black theology from Cain Hope Felder’s Stony the Road we Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation as well as a number of historical essays that will help to further historicize our primary readings.
Requirements:
One page response on readings, class reports, one review of scholarship (10-15
pages), and a longer seminar paper (15-20 pages).