ENG 4934 Spring 2022 Wilson

How have American chattel slavery and the racist views necessary to perpetuate its remnants into the Jim Crow era indelibly marked African Americans as queer objects of desire and masochistic violence? How might we begin to investigate queerness not only in literature that addresses LGBTQ experiences directly but also those that expose the ways that Eurocentric fictions about black masculinity and femininity queer even ostensibly heterosexual experiences? The philosophies and criticism of Hortense Spillers, Cheryl I. Harris, E. Patrick Johnson, Sharon Holland, and others will empower us to engage these two focal questions and devise our own paths of inquiry and research as we (re?)read canonical texts such as The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973) alongside important works such as Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (1975), Octavia Butler’s Dawn (1987), Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Cafe (1992), Randall Kenan’s Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (1992) and genre-bending poetic gems from this century, including Robin Coste Lewis's National Book Award-winning Voyage of the Sable Venus (2015), Kyle Dargan’s Honest Engine (2015), and Chet'la Sebree’s Mistress (2019), and Claude McKay’s recently discovered and published Renaissance novel, Romance in Marseille.

This course fulfills the Literature Capstone requirement and meets the Scholarship in Practice (s) requirement for Liberal Studies.