120032 PS Proseminar Cultural and Regional Studies (Interdisciplinary Course): "Native Sons" (2008W)

This course interrogates narratives of Black masculinities in 20th-century US-American literary and cultural history. We take as our entrance point a selection of both canonized and lesser known texts by writers and critics such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, considering the ways in which these texts shape concepts of race, gender, and sexuality. What notions of Black masculinity do they take up, and how do they reformulate them? We will complicate our assessment of the course material (novels, essays, films, and scholarly articles) by examining their claim to various genres and by investigating their potential functions and effects in the larger framework of a predominantly racist, sexist, and hetero-normative society. In this context, we will attend to the ways in which Black authors established speaking positions that have always already been gendered. Finally, contextualizing and historicizing narratives of Black masculinities will help us to establish a template for reading contemporary instantiations of Black masculinities such as, for instance, Barack Obama's candidacy for the US presidency.