Course Description

This course is a comparative study of literature by African Diasporic writers who reside in the United States, and the relationship of those works to the struggles for positive representation, equality, and human rights. By employing an interdisciplinary approach, including literary, cultural, and historical methods of inquiry, we will be able to gain a better understanding of the multifaceted issues facing Afro-descendents. The analysis and critique of literature from the African Diaspora in the form of novels, essays, and short stories, provides ideal locations to interrogate the historical and contemporary formations of Black politics of identity and culture, while also illustrating internal contradictions of race, ethnicity, gender, class, color, sexuality, culture, nationalism, and immigration.