AFRS 228 - African American Literature

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

(Same as ENGL 228) Topic for 2024/25b: Black Modernism: On Ghosts, Mystics, And Prophets. In charging Black artists with producing “a counterculture of modernity,” critic Paul Gilroy referenced how these creative intellectuals brought to light the violences that inhabited modernity’s underside. As all blacks do, these artists carried [an unflattering] history on their bodies, one that put immense pressure on the progress narrative the West wished to tell about itself. The means they used to challenge if not correct historical meaning in their creative work were characters— apparent conjure figures–that seemed to have some uncanny command of time and space. Beginning with the modernist innovations of African American writers after the Harlem Renaissance, this course ranges from the social protest fiction of the 1940s through the Black Arts Movement to the postmodernist experiments of contemporary African American writers. In giving our attention to these conjure figures, we cover the debates that have informed African American literary production, particularly the tension that has existed between the aesthetic and the political imperatives that inform the art. Tyrone Simpson.

This course satisfies the REGS requirement for the English major.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS