ENGL3598W: African American Literature & Culture: Harlem Renaissance-Present

African Americans are "America?s metaphor," Richard Wright declared, posing both a riddle and a riff at odds with conventional perspectives. Wright intimated that we might discover in the shadows of American literary life our brightest mirrors and thereby see ourselves ? and the paradoxes and potentialities of our national experience ? through the world of words and images conjured up over the past two centuries by African American writers. In this course, we employ a cornucopia of literary texts, audiovisual materials, and internet resources to bring the figures of Black literary tradition out of the shadows and under an extended exploratory gaze. This course focuses exclusively on the twentieth century and opens with the Depression Era 1930s radical literary insurgency of Richard Wright and his literary allies, and then moves forward to the Second Black Renaissance, or Black Arts Movement, of the 1960s and '70s and beyond ? paralleling the civil rights decades and the rising Black Power insurgencies of SNCC, CORE, and the Black Panthers and their literary counterparts.

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