AML 4604 Spring 2024

This course situates representative novels within the larger conversational framework of the black body -- in motion, scarred, marked, vanished, dismembered, and remembered. Relying upon recent scholarship surrounding the body as a trope for a traumatic history involving slavery, colonization, and Jim Crow as well as a site for the remembrance of a lost, fragmented heritage, we will discuss a range of novels in terms of their insights into various moments in the black experience and the political implications of blackness in the American Republic. Our readings will also permit us to consider gendered and queered bodies concerning their relation to extant or 'official' history. African American literature, history, and culture imagines America, in general, and the South, in particular, as a space where the black body enters, but seldom leaves, at least intact. We will examine this mythology through texts by authors whose works chronicle the search for freedom, wholeness, and selfhood in a New World setting.