AML 2600 Spring 2024

This survey course introduces students to representative works in African-American Literary and Cultural Studies with a view to interrogating the conversational relationship between authors and texts. Our investigation begins with a focus on the slave narrative before considering the symbolic acts of religion, speech, and music figuring prominently in Black American writing. Not only will our readings offer an overview of major figures, texts, and issues during successive historical moments and the ways that writers read and respond to each other, but we also consider how that colloquial exchange lends itself to the construction of an established story involving the search for freedom, self-identity, and wholeness within and against a US geopolitical setting.