AFRO 105

Spring 2022 Part of Term 1

Part of Term 1
Jan 18-May 4

Black Literature in America

SHOW FINAL EXAM SCHEDULE

Credit: 3 hours.

Survey of the literary work of Black Americans from 1746 to the present. Exploration of the social, cultural, and political contexts that have shaped the Black American literary tradition by analyzing not only poetry, drama, autobiographical narratives, short stories, and novels, but also folktales, spirituals, and contemporary music.

Same as ENGL 150.

This course satisfies the General Education Criteria in Fall 2022 for:

Cultural Studies - US Minority

Humanities – Lit & Arts

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AFRO 105 class schedule data for spring 2022
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	61994	Lecture-Discussion	IR	11:00AM -12:20PM	TR	Henry Administration Bldg	Hunt, I	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/18/22-05/04/22 Degree Notes: Humanities - Lit & Arts, and Cultural Studies - US Minority course. Section Info: Black Literature in America: The Afterlife of Property. Literary critic Saidiya Hartman writes in her 2008 essay “Venus in Two Acts” that “Wrestling with the [enslaved] girl’s claim on the present is a way of naming our time, thinking our present, and envisioning the past which has created it.” In this survey of African American literature from 1746 to the present, structured by Hartman’s conception of the relationship between the past and the present as “the afterlife of property,” we will read a collection of texts that speak to what it has meant to be a black subject in the United States over the past three centuries. How does history inform the way that African American experiences are transformed into literary expression? What links can we as contemporary readers draw between literature that emerges from past sociocultural and political contexts and our present-day understandings of racial (and gender, sexuality, and class) identity? Beginning with slave narratives and considering fiction, drama, poetry, essay, and contemporary film, we will attempt in this class to understand African American literature as a tradition haunted and informed by the fraught history of black bodies in the Americas, continually speaking to and reaching beyond “property” as legacy and inheritance.