AML 5608 Montgomery Fall 2022

With Gloria Naylor’s published and unpublished material as the basis for our inquiry, we will examine the close, yet contested relationship between black women’s archival production and twentieth and twenty-first century literary history. John Cristophe-Cloutier’s Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature serves as the locus for our literary detective work in interrogating Naylor’s multi-faceted role as novelist, memoirist, editor, playwright, film production company manager, and public intellectual. Not only will our investigation of Naylor’s archival sensibility take into account archival moments in her fiction, we will also consider her unpublished letters, drafts of work-in-progress, research notes, unpublished plays, and other ephemera in relation to her award-winning literary output. We will cover such topics as Naylor’s conversational relationship with Ann Petry, Toni Morrison, Edwidge Danticat, Nikki Giovanni, Terry McMillan, and others; the need for a black feminist intervention in the film industry; and the challenges and rich possibilities of black folk material for the dramatic arts. Ultimately, our goal is to lay the critical groundwork for framing a black feminist model for archival research that addresses the troubling silence surrounding black women’s papers broadly.

Required Texts:

• Jean Christophe-Cloutier, Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature

• Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals

• Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place, Linden Hills, Mama Day, Bailey’s Café, The Men of Brewster Place, and 1996