ENGL 150

Spring 2022 Part of Term 1

Part of Term 1
Jan 18-May 4

Credit: 3 hours.

Same as AFRO 105. See AFRO 105.

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

Cultural Studies - US Minority
Humanities – Lit & Arts
ENGL 150 class schedule data for spring 2022
CRN Type Section Time Day Location Instructor Section Details
61996
Lecture-Discussion
IR
11:00AM -12:20PM
TR
137 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:
SP22 ENGL 150: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.
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