AML 2600 Spring 2024

This is an interdisciplinary approach to the literatures, histories, and cultures of the Afro-Gulf South that takes its cue from our close proximity to the Gulf of Mexico. Through texts offering contemporary readers historical constructions of the South as well as more recent texts, we will consider the cultural place of the Afro-Gulf South in our sociopolitical imagination. Our texts and authors will be varied. They include: slave narratives, fiction, memoir, photography, film, and music. For example, we will gain lyrical, anthropological insight from Zora Neale Hurston; engage poetic sensibilities with Natasha Tretheway; confront our understanding of memory and violence in the documentary work of Valerie Scoon; attend to the painful reality of climate change with Jesmyn Ward; and search for citizenship in the memoir of Richard Wright. The music of spirituals, work songs, juke joints, tent revivals, and chitlin circuit stops from Bradfordville, Florida, to Big Freedia’s New Orleans will be the soundtrack to our semester.