AML 4604- Fall 2025 – Montgomery

This diversity within Western culture course surveys representative fiction with a view to understanding the body as a trope for a traumatic history involving slavery, colonization, and trans-Atlantic migration as well as a site for envisioning radically-transformed futures. Issues of border-crossing, post-human or trans-human constructions, and liminal subjectivities will figure prominently in our conversations. We will read and discuss works by Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid, Charles Johnson, Gloria Naylor, Edwidge Danticat, Colson Whitehead, and others in an interrogation of the body as a social metaphor and cultural convention.