AML 2600 Spring 2018 Gaines

This course serves as an introduction to African American literature that refuses to take its own blackness for granted. Since race is a socially constructed fiction that rigorously maintains very real structures of privilege for some at the disadvantage of others, the perceived gains and losses enabled by racial passing have always been of the utmost concern to the African American writer. This course considers those texts that lend insight into how the African American literary tradition theorizes communal belonging in the face of a deep ambivalence around notions of racial identification and authenticity. It also suggests that this consideration offers a nuanced perspective on the canon of African American literature. Fiction and film will provide the opportunity to discuss privilege, surveillance, colorism, representation, and authenticity. We will also begin to think critically about the relationships between blood and the law, love and politics, opportunity and economics, and acting and being.

Questions to be considered include: What work does the highly gendered depictions of the “tragic mulatta” figure (a mixed-race woman undone by her periled existence between two racialized worlds) do for, and to, African American literature? What happens when the color line crosses you? Or in other words, where is agency in this discussion? Do we really know blackness when we see it? Hear it? How (and why) is blackness performed and for (and by) whom? In what ways is identity shaped by who can and can’t pass? And finally, what do we make of a literary tradition that supposedly gains coherence around issues of racial belonging but continually questions race itself?

• Erasure (Percival Everett)
• Iola Leroy (Frances Harper)
• Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (James Weldon Johnson)
• Passing (Nella Larsen)
• Black No More (George Schuyler)
• Caucasia (Danzy Senna)