ENGL 7760 AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Instructor: Prof. Claiborne
Sections: 1:15-5:15 TF
Hours: 3

Writing the Civil Rights Movement

This class is a study of the struggle for racial justice through the eyes and visions of men and women who, as activists, participated in the movement, or who, as essayists, fiction writers, and cultural critics, chronicled and critiqued the movement’s issues and events. Discussions in the class will be multi-voiced discourses on the interconnections and frictions between race and politics. Texts for this course will cover a wide range of genres from oral histories, memoirs, and interviews to fiction, poetry, and drama written during the movement or reset in the movement. Therefore, our focus will be both the texts and the contexts.

Requirements: weekly response papers and seminar paper (17-20 pages).

Reading List will include, but is not limited to:
Jon Meacham (ed.), Voices in Our Blood: America’s Best on the Civil Right’s Movement
Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power
Assata Shakur, Assata: an Autobiography
Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice
June Jordan, Naming Our Destiny
Alice Walker, Meridian
Amiri Baraka. Dutchman
Martin Luther King, Strength to Love
Lawrie Balfour, The Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy