ENGL 7770 African-American Literature
12:30–3:10 T
Joy Leighton
This seminar will take the following question as its point of departure: In nineteenth-century American literature, how do works by African Americans develop their own unique voice and, at the same time, engage in the formation of a national literature(s) and culture(s)? In other words, during a period when the nascent nation is concerned with establishing an identity for itself, aesthetically, culturally, and politically, how do the writings by slaves and freedmen and women contribute to the mythic vision of America as well as contest the terms (moral, legal) of the discourse? How is African-American writing essentially “American”?
There are several important qualifications that must be made clear about our endeavors. 1) What is the space of “America”? Indeed, what is “America,” especially since it is now more accurately called U.S. Literature or the Literature of the Americas, the latter which emphasizes the other “Americas” Columbus’s discovery brought forth as well as the plurality of voices within the States. 2) We will examine the different genres of writing by African-Americans, not only “literature” per se, which is a loaded term that suggests certain inviolate categories that are at odds with our basic principles of inquiry. For instance, we will read a condemned slave’s “confession,” slave narratives, sentimental domestic fiction, racial protest literature, dialect writing, and competing theories/philosophies of race. It’s time for a renovation of the sacred (but decaying) halls of “literature.” 3) What is “race”? Let us not presume to think we know the answer to the question too quickly or confidently. A general definition of the term might be, race, conceived of as difference, is automatically and always the ground for hierarchy and inequality. Whether race is a social construction or a kind of essence will be the unresolved question in the seminar (although I tend toward the former, even the brilliant Du Bois was of two minds). 4) Paradoxically, although race is always so large, encompassing and swallowing everything, it is never quite enough in terms of understanding identity. Therefore, our inquiry of race will have to consider its intersection with gender, sexuality, class, and region (to name a few) in order to comprehend more fully the complexity of the subject at hand.
Possibly, this seminar is concerned more with clarifying the multitude of qualifications of the subject; possibly, the qualifications are the subject. This last statement suggests my approach to the body of writing we will examine and the ideas we will take up: as academics, knowledge is the center of and basis for our authority. Yet in studying the complexity of African-American writings, how can this project also teach us to exercise authority in a way slightly different than the authority that effected the ground of difference that produced conditions for this body of writing? Possibly an impossible task? Conundrums and paradoxes aside, also consider this course as a place to begin studying some of the important works and theories of African-American writing in the nineteenth century.
Required Texts:
- Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison
- The Confessions of Nat Turner: and Related Documents, Nat Turner
- Blake or the Huts of America, Martin Delany
- Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, Harriet Jacobs
- Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted, Frances E. W. Harper
- Our Nig: or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, Harriet E. Wilson
- My Bondage and My Freedom, Frederick Douglass
- Southern Horrors and Other Writings; The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900, Ida B. Wells
- Up From Slavery, Booker T. Washington
- The Souls of Black Folk: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, W. E. B. Du Bois
- Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, Pauline Hopkins
- Conjure Tales and Stories of the Color Line, Charles W. Chesnutt
We will also read critical essays by Hazel Carby, Anthony Appiah, Eric Lott, Homi Bhabha, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Sander L. Gilman, and Paul Gilroy.
Requirements:
Weekly response papers, seminar presentation, and research paper.