AML 4604 Fall 2018 Montgomery

This course situates representative novels within the larger conversational framework of the black body -- in motion, scarred, dismembered, and remembered. Relying upon recent scholarship surrounding the body as a trope for a traumatic history involving slavery, colonization, and Jim Crow politics as well as a site for the remembrance of a lost, fragmented heritage, we will discuss a range of novels in terms of their insights into various moments in the black experience and the political implications of blackness in the American Republic. Our readings will also permit us to consider gendered and queered bodies concerning their relation to extant or 'official' history. African-America Literature, History, and Culture holds 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 mythology through the lens of texts by authors whose works chronicle the search for freedom, wholeness, and selfhood in a New World setting.

Required Texts:

• Toni Morrison, A Mercy
• Gloria Naylor, Mama Day
• James Baldwin, Go Tell it on the Mountain
• Charles Johnson, Middle Passage
• Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory
• Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John
• Paule Marshall, Praisesong For the Widow
• Gayle Jones, Corregidora