You have probably read or heard about the mother-daughter connections and, in our case, the relationships of black mothers and their daughters, and/or black grandmothers and their female descendants. I am struck, however, by the scarcity of courses on the literary depictions of the  relationships between black fathers, father figures (grandfathers, uncles, older male siblings, cousins, god-fathers, etc.) and their sons/"sons" in Africa and Africa America. Meeting various course designations for students, this class is conceived and structured as a transatlantic meditation on that father-son dynamic. We will discuss such representative works as Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Mongo Beti’s The Poor Christ of Bomba, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain and "Letter to My Nephew," Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. Because one of these novels will be one of the two works you will explore comparatively in your research paper, we will only be discussing the rest of the authors in class. You'll still need all the titles, however.