ENG 4934 -Fall 2026 - Wilson

In Poetics, Aristotle declares a writer’s role is to relate “not what has happened, but what may happen.” In addition to theorizing humans’ inclination to imitate, he acknowledges individuals’ instinct to reach “special altitudes” of “Song” and “harmony.” This course considers this differentiation between history and poetics and reframes African American, Afro-Latino/a, and Afro-Caribbean writers including but not limited to Phillis Wheatley Peters, Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Jean Toomer, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Octavia Butler, Yusef Komunyakaa, Randall Kenan, Gloria Naylor, George C. Wolfe, Terrance Hayes, francine j. harris, Desiree Bailey, Jeremy O. Harris, Robin Coste Lewis, and Rickey Laurentiis as representative of “special altitudes” Black writers have reached beyond imitation of Western traditions and canons. We will harmonize, in our own writing, with models these writers offer as we (re)define a twenty-first-century poetics of writing across cultures inspired by how they trouble tropes of colorblindness, American exceptionalism, and citizenship and blur lines delineating gender, genre, and binary markers of sexual identity. We will spend the semester investigating two questions: How did U.S. chattel slavery and the views necessary to perpetuate its potency in the post-emancipation Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras mark those who are Black as “queer” objects  of desire and violence? What subjectivities have American writers of the African diaspora fashioned over four centuries to shift discourse to include LGBTQIA experiences and the ways in which fictions about Black masculinities and femininities queer even ostensibly heterosexual intimacies across cultures?