From Slavery to Freedom: African American Writing - Single View

African American history, literature, and culture is often presented and studied within the teleological frame of “from slavery to freedom”: The history of the slave trade, the Middle Passage and the Institution of Slavery in North America, to the Emancipation Proclamation, the heydays of the Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement, and the first Black American President as a supposed symbol of a post-racist society. The leitmotif of freedom therefore represents a productive vantage point on African American history, as well as on the changes of literary production within this rich and affluent tradition. Throughout the seminar, we will explore the quest for an identity and subject position as black Americans. We will therefore trace the literary and cultural production historically from slavery to freedom, or rather from slave narrative to contemporary African American artists and critics. In doing so this seminar seeks to complicate the meaning of freedom in its different historic moments for African American experience and artistic expression.

Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Claude McKay, Rudolph Fisher, Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Gloria Naylor, John Edgar Wideman, Toni Morrison. Reading Material will be made available on the seminar platform Moodle.

Regular attendance is mandatory for all students (no more than 3 absences). You are required to complete all the assigned readings and study questions prior to class. Short and unannounced quizzes will ensure that all students comply with the requirements. Each student will be asked to give a short presentation on an assigned topic.