ENG 379 BLACK POETICS

How does one evoke a black world? What does it look like? Sound like? Taste like? This course considers these matters of black poetics – the formal practices that black thinkers use to represent U.S. and Caribbean black lives and experiences. While we anchor our investigations in poetry, we invite a broad conception of poetics that also examines the rhetoric, ethics, and aesthetics that thinkers use to (re)present a black world in oratory, music, and visual experimentation. Works from McKay, Dove, Rankine, Hayes, Jess, Mendi+Keith Obadike, and Shockley.