120032 PS Interdisciplinary Course (501) = Proseminar Cultural Studies (2010S)

Starting from the assumption that slavery divested enslaved subjects of their gendered subjectivity - reducing them to commodified "flesh" (Hortense Spillers) -, we will examine a selection of literary and filmic texts that were produced in the U.S. as a response to the transatlantic slave trade. We will interrogate the ways in which these texts are invested in the re-conceptualization of enslaved people as gendered subjects and in the struggle for emancipation from oppressive power structures. What are their aesthetic and formal means to "tell a free story" (William Andrews)? How do their narrators conceptualize the intersections of racialized and gendered articulations of power? What is the relevance of accounts against slavery for racialized concepts of gender in US-American history, literature, and culture today?
The texts we will turn to span a time period from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century and cover a number of different genres and media - poems, treatises, slave narratives, novels, films, and essays. We will back up our readings of narrative texts by engaging a number of scholarly articles on the topics of slavery and writing, transatlantic modernity and gender, and the interconnectedness of race, gender, and genre.