ENG 383 - Ethnic American Literature A: Black Poetics and “the Queer” or B: Black Literature Since 1953– The Poetics of Black Beauty

Instructor

Varies

Both A and B satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric distribution requirement.
Counts toward the Africana Studies major.

383A Ethnic American Literature-Black Poetics and “the Queer”
Instructor
Staff

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.​


383B Ethnic American Literatures:  Black Literature Since 1953 – The Poetics of Black Beauty
Instructor
Staff

Starting with Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha and “The Mother” from her 1963 Collected Poems and culminating with the “rachet/bootylicious” poetics of Beyoncé, this course will trace the ways that black female artists have continued to cast off expectations of respectability, invoking the sinful, the risqué, the forbidden, as they complicate the mantra “Black Is Beautiful” that was central to the “black aesthetic” Amiri Baraka, Addison Gayle, Larry Neal, and others posited as essential to liberate the race from the tyranny of the white imagination. Along the way, the poems of Nikki Giovanni, Lucille Clifton, Ai, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Rita Dove, and others will be used to reflect on their invocation of and tribute to the performance of singer-activists Josephine Baker, Nina Simone, Tina Turner, Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin, and others who have informed the hypersexual diva ethos Beyoncé has used to dominate contemporary pop culture.