Survey of African American Literature, Beginnings to 1865–Writing Intensive, online-2nd 8-wk [***]

What is African American literature? How did early African American authors use their writings to imagine new possibilities for Black life in the United States? This eight-week asynchronous course surveys the development of African American literature from its early oral traditions and folklore through the literatures of slavery, abolition, and Reconstruction.  We will examine how early African American writers adopted different genres to define themselves and challenge racial hierarchies, respond to the political and social constraints of their time, and contribute to the formation of a distinct literary tradition.

Required texts include Clotel; or The President’s Daughter by William Wells Brown, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, and The Wife of His Youth by Charles Chesnutt. Through discussion boards, creative projects, and a final analytical paper, we will explore these forms of literary activism and all the ways these early writers asserted their intellectual authority and contributed to the cultural frame of the nation