ENG 379 BLACK POETICS

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.