AST 241 Contemporary Black Women Writers
How do novels by contemporary African American and Black British women writers encourage us to rethink our understandings of racial identity? This course examines the literary devices and formal innovations employed by Black women writers to represent the lives of black characters and black people more broadly. It responds to a style of interpreting black novels that reads them only as sociological documents that grant insights into what is then positioned as an alien culture; it replaces this purely sociological focus with an insistence on the artistry of the text, an analysis of the ways that Black women writers invent new formal techniques and artistic innovations for representing realities that are less readily acknowledged in the larger culture. At the center of the course is the oppositional voice of Black women writers. The course reads these writers as responding to canonical representations of blackness through their own insistent presentations of the racial past and its possible futures, through their remaking of the literary genres of the canon that help generate representations of blackness, and through their reimagining of the very category of Black womanhood in new, more expansive and liberating ways.
Cross Listed Courses
LTWR 241 and WGSS 241