Mar 28, 2024  
2015-2016 
    
2015-2016 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

ENG 383 - Ethnic American Literature-Black Poetics and “the Queer”


Instructor
Wilson

Predating the nation’s founding, African American literature has been marked since its inception by its writers 1) affirming their equal humanity under the auspices of divine forces while being treated as subhuman property; 2) staking claim upon and expanding the ideals of what constitutes American identity and culture; and 3) reflecting on their state of being as those living with what preeminent scholar W.E.B. Du Bois terms a “double consciousness,” a keen, spiritual awareness of a dual citizenship and ancestry in these United States and in a continent that has always been at once reviled for its link to dark skin and religious and cultural difference and revered for its wealth of natural resources. This course will explore that journey of discovery, mourning and protest-subtle in its nuanced critique in the eighteenth century and at times scathing in its nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first century manifestations-in the poetics of African American writers. Primarily, we will be studying lineated poetry, but we will also ponder the ways these writers blur and expand genre boundaries in poetic fiction, nonfiction prose, spoken word, and song and in the ways that gender and sexuality further complicate what it means to be non-white and American. This course will close by mining the poetics of writers of color of other ethnicities who have arrived on these shores experiencing similar ostracism and oppression and have adapted African Americans’ creative, rhetorical modes to serve their own poetic (re)visions and expansions of American, non-white identities. In this course, we’ll explore the possibilities of the word “queer,”  as it is used by the writers themselves, both in the classical sense of odd and striking deviation from a norm and for its contemporary theoretical utility in exploring representations of non-heteronormative sexuality and gender performance.​