AML 5296 Spring 2024

This interdisciplinary course considers the many, complicated, and sometimes competing origin stories attempting to establish belonging and identity to and for Black people in the face of enslavement, dislocation, racial terror, segregation, and migration. From folklore, myth, and reconsiderations of history to neo-slave narratives and speculative fiction, Black Americans have long used story to establish collectivities of self in spite of America’s places, spaces, and temporalities of unfreedom. We will confront myths of Africa through Saidiya Hartman, contend with the consequences of Alex Haley’s embellishments, speculate about Black futures with Janelle Monae and Octavia Butler, and reconsider the plantation with Toni Morrison.