African American Literature I

This course examines African American literature and vernacular culture from 1746 to 1940. Students explore the major authors, genres, aesthetics, political movements, and intersectional tropes of the period. The course focuses on the slave narrative, the Abolitionist movement, minstrelsy, the Civil War, racial uplift politics, Reconstruction, plantation literature, Post-Reconstruction, the New Negro movement, the Great Migration, the New Deal, Popular Front radicalism, and social realism. Students also explore representations of the law and technology in the primary texts. The course emphasizes African American resistance, agency, transculturation, intertextuality, and cultural continuity.