ENG 4043 Fall 2023 Okonkwo

In their significations as music, experience, and vernacular ways of contemplating beauty in works of imagination, blues and jazz have deep roots in African American history and culture, although their instrumentation, content, and form track back to Africa and Europe. Their influences have remained global. For decades, especially since the New Negro Movement or Harlem Renaissance, African American thinkers and cultural workers have tapped into the two intertwined cultural forms. In this course, we will explore blues and jazz in African American literature and culture. In addition to charting the histories of both genres and sampling blues and jazz music proper, our main goal will be to consider the depth to which blues and jazz registers can help us illuminate African American poetry, short stories, novels, and plays. We will discuss select works by critically acclaimed African American writers, including James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Jane Cortez, Gayl Jones, August Wilson, and Toni Morrison. The poems and short stories will be uploaded on the course Canvas site. This promises to be one the best, indeed one of the most enriching, classes you will take in fall semester!