AML 5027 Fall 2019 Mariano

Racial segregation has been called the “structural lynchpin” of inequality in the United States and challenged as a “badge” through which slavery extends its long shadow over social, economic, political, and cultural outcomes. Despite this influence, inadequate formal attention has been given to the literature that attempts to represent and theorize the experience of segregation. In this course, we will seek to remedy that gap by studying and producing scholarship on late-nineteenth and twentieth-century segregation narratives in terms of their historical production and the formal, thematic, and theoretical principles that unite them across the vast terrain of genres and literary forms in which they are found and permutated.

Because of the immense cultural, legal, and political ramifications of this literature, our study necessarily defies rigid disciplinary boundaries. Fields and topics will include: demarcation of racial and ethnic categories; geographies and cartographies of power; legal and extra-legal mechanisms of enforcement; constructs of criminality; fictions of personhood; the creation of the American ghetto; mass incarceration; police brutality; xenophobia and nativism; race and domesticity; gender; class; environmental injustice; and white supremacies and nationalisms.

Our initial focus will be on African-American segregation, we will also look at fiction and poetry representing Japanese-American internment, ethnic enclaves, and Native-American reservations. However, at its most conceptual, the segregation narrative is about the structural divisions that separate persons and the mechanisms by which they are enforced; thus, there will be wide opportunity to relocate the theoretical and critical frameworks to additional areas of interest.

Authors may include: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Charles Chesnutt, Thomas Dixon, Ann Petry, Zora Neale Hurston, writers of the Harlem Renaissance; Flannery O’Connor, Lillian Smith, Toni Morrison, Patricia Williams, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, Sherman Alexie, Hisaya Yamamoto, and Maxine Hong Kingston.

Major assignments: (1) creating and teaching a single-day’s lesson plan, and (2) writing a potentially-publishable research article (including a substantial annotated bibliography, several drafts, in-class writing workshops, and a polished abstract).