English 275 - Foundations of Af Am Lit

(Offered as ENGL 275 and BLST 232 [US].)  The focus of this introduction to the study of African American literature and culture will be the complex intertextuality at the heart of the African American expressive tradition.  Tracing some of the tradition’s major formal and thematic concerns means looking for the rhythms and riffs that link different kinds of texts:  literature, film, music, and the spoken word.  While engaging a range of textual experiences, from learning to read silences in narratives of American slavery through coming to understand Afrofuturism and other developments in black speculative fiction, this course will also expose students to a range of analytic and critical production modes that are important to literary and cultural study in general.

Fall semester.  Professor Parham.