ENGL 559

Spring 2016 Part of Term 1

Part of Term 1
Jan 19-May 4

Seminar Afro-American Lit

SHOW FINAL EXAM SCHEDULE

Credit: 4 hours.

May be repeated if topics vary. Prerequisite: One college course devoted entirely to an aspect of American literature or consent of instructor.

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ENGL 559 class schedule data for spring 2016
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	39298	Lecture-Discussion	R	1:00PM -2:50PM	R	English Building	Jenkins, C	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/19/16-05/04/16 Section Title: Class, Sex and the Racial Body Section Info: Topic Section R: Black and Bourgeois in the Flesh: Class, Sex, and the Racial Body In this course we will examine how African American authors in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries grapple with the question of black class privilege, and particularly with an inherent tension between the racialized excess of embodiment that accrues to notions of “blackness,” and the tendency of privilege to mask or erase the body’s traces. With this ontological dilemma in mind, we will consider how and why African American narratives of the post-Civil Rights era have articulated black bourgeois identity as a problematically embodied state—implicating interraciality’s visible markers as classed signs, but also speaking beyond racial phenotype and its underlying histories, to the ways in which the intersection of “race” and “class” operates viscerally, as corporeal and even libidinal performance. Throughout our study, we will consider how the unique socio-historical circumstances surrounding the “black” body—circumstances that recall Hortense Spillers’ crucial distinction between body and flesh and the latter’s “vestibular” relation to Western culture--inform narrative representations of class, and particularly of class privilege, and speak to their complex relationship to corporeality for black subjects. In exploring how African American class privilege lives “in the flesh,” we will consider, as well, the vulnerability and violability of the black body, and how this vulnerability manifests in particular ways in the post-Civil Rights and “post-racial” moment and relates to the fiscal precariousness of the (post-)postmodern and what Jeffrey Nealon calls “just-in-time capitalism.” Primary texts will include both fiction and memoir—some possibilities are Toi Derricotte’s The Black Notebooks, Percival Everett’s Erasure, Andrea Lee’s Sarah Phillips, Reginald McKnight’s He Sleeps, Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, Michael Thomas’s Man Gone Down, and Rebecca Walker’s Black, White, and Jewish, among others—as well as films by Spike Lee and Dee Rees. Critical and theoretical readings will include works by Elizabeth Alexander, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Nicole Fleetwood, Sharon Holland, Frederic Jameson, Karyn Lacy, Rupali Mukherjee, Jeffrey Nealon, Naomi Pabst, Darieck Scott, Jared Sexton, Hortense Spillers, Diana Taylor, and Harvey Young. Requirements: participation, weekly discussion-board postings, oral presentation, final seminar paper. Students should read Hortense Spillers’ essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” in preparation for the first class meeting. Restriction(s): Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.