AML 4604 - Fall 2025 - Wilson

“We know that we are beautiful. And ugly too,” New Negro Renaissance superstar Langston Hughes wrote in The Nation in his 1926 manifesto “The Negro Artist and Racial Mountain,” a response to “The Negro Art Hokum,” an essay that conservative satirist George Schuyler had published a week earlier. This course begins at the apocryphal moment these two men (and a host of others) debated about how the children and grandchildren of newly emancipated African Americans should express themselves in literature (drama, fiction, nonfiction, poetry), dance, music, film, and visual art. Black folk had shown how integral they were to an “American” identity but had not been allowed to delineate their singular contributions and define their original aesthetic standards outside the European ones and the ones that had emerged in the era of American chattel slavery that had shaped misperceptions of them and their cultural contributions. Alongside primary texts, we will study the debates driving the evolution of Black artists’ literary traditions from the Renaissance to the period known as the Black Arts Movement. To this end, we will spend the semester investigating two central questions: How have Black Americans invoked and revoked the stereotypical characterizations of blackness (Mammy, Uncle Tom, Buck, Jezebel, Sambo, Pickaninny, etc.) that persist? To what end are contemporary conceptions and representations of beauty shaped by these painful chapters in history as well as those that have recurred in the last century? By this course’s end, you will be able to answer, with greater confidence and complexity, what makes Blackness—with all its wonders and fraught humanities—beautiful, “way back then”—and now? This fall's course will set up explorations of Black beauty aesthetics that enrollees can continue in Spring 2026 as we explore the flowering of Black arts from the Blaxploitation era to the present day.