Cross listed with BL-STU 3400-01

This 8-week online asynchronous diversity intensive course introduces students to the major developments, themes, and works of African American literature-from its eighteenth-century beginnings to 1900, the post-Civil War and Reconstruction Era.  The course has three objectives: a) to explore African American literature's continuing response to the call of African, American, and Afro-British American oral and written traditions-in the form of folktales, songs, sermons, prose, and poetry; b) to examine the social, political, and cultural influences of early African-American literature; and, c) to analyze the implications of this literature through class discussions and the following assignments: meaningful reading responses, one short essay, one oral presentation, one group presentation, and one final essay. This course  meets the Diversity Intensive requirement for students in the College of Arts and Sciences by providing a parallel survey of the history of race, imperialism, colonialism, cultural genocide, nation formation, identity, gender, and religion, sexual coercion, human commodification, and its implications for centuries of inequality and their concomitant multi-racial and multi-ethnic responses in subtle, militant, conservative, and liberal voices through the exploration of oral traditions and literary genres of people of African descent in the United States of American from their arrival as enslaved people from the continent of Africa to their arrival and subsequent (de)volution as chattel (movable, inheritable property, in perpetuity) and their post-enslavement reconstructed defacto slaves and half-citizens.