AML4604 Spring 2025 - Montgomery

This course situates representative novels within the larger conversational framework of the 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 representative novels in terms of their insights into various moments in the Black experience. Our readings will also permit us to consider gendered and queered bodies in relation to written, documented, or 'official' history. African-American Literature, History, and Culture imagines America in general and the South in particular as spaces where the black body enters, but seldom leaves, at least intact. We will examine nuances of meaning associated with this reality through texts by authors whose works chronicle the search for freedom, wholeness, and selfhood in a New World setting.