123250 AR Literature Course - 1/2 (MA) American/North American & Cultural Studies (2023S)

This course offers a critical exploration of the manifold themes, aesthetics, and knowledges to be found in Black women’s writing in English. We will read and reflect on texts written between early 20th century and today, by authors originating from North America (the U.S. and Canada), the Caribbean, and Africa, representing a variety of national, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds. With such diversity, can we think about “Black women’s writing” as tradition, a body of texts characterized by continuities as much as innovations? What – if anything – do these diverse authors, and their works, have in common other than their race and gender? How are Black women’s individual identities and experiences mediated by the historical, social, and cultural contexts in which they are lived? In other words, how is the personal political, and the political personal, in their works? How have ideas and themes of community, ancestry, spirituality, sexuality, memory, and liberation functioned in Black women’s writing across time and space? Can we talk about literature as a way of producing knowledge – and, if so, what knowledge can we find in Black women’s writing?

In the spirit of the Akan principle of Sankofa, which encourages us to go back to the past to learn for the future, we will begin our search for answers to these questions with a contemporary text of popular culture – Beyoncé’s 2016 visual album Lemonade – and then move back in time to trace a genealogy of literary explorations of womanhood, Blackness, spirituality, memory, and liberation in Black women’s writing.

Upon completion of this course, students should:

• be familiar with selected literary works by Black women authors and be able to situate them in the broader tradition(s) of Black women’s writing;
• understand and be able to explain, with relevant examples, how the themes of gender and racial identity, sexism and racism, spirituality, community, ancestry, embodiment and sexuality, memory, and liberation have functioned in selected texts from Black women’s literary tradition(s);
• have a degree of familiarity with African American and Black diasporic histories and cultures sufficient to understand and explain how particular texts are in conversation with these contexts, and how the author’s positionality as a Black woman mediates the text and its context;
• understand and be able to explain theoretical and critical approaches such as Black feminism, womanism, and intersectionality, among others, and to effectively apply them in literary analysis;
• develop a deeper understanding of and appreciation for Black women’s literature as it operates at the intersections of aesthetics and politics, artistic imagination and social critique, form and content, and be able to explain how a particular text integrates its artistic and political functions;
• be able to apply the knowledge obtained in this course to formulate a competent and insightful research question related to Black women’s writing, propose an original and argumentative thesis statement that answers such question, and convincingly support it with argumentation and textual evidence (from both primary and secondary sources) that includes but also goes beyond the material discussed in class;
• display an increased fluency in academic research, critical thinking, and academic writing, including skills such as conducting library and database research, critical engagement with various literary and critical/theoretical texts, formulation of insightful and original theses on topics related to the contents of the course, and eloquent substantiation of their theses and opinions with textual evidence as well as secondary sources obtained through research.