English 257 - African American Literature

This course is a survey of African-American plays, novels, poetry, and non-fiction from the antebellum period to the present. Readings will focus on writers responding to the afterlife of slavery through a feminist lens. Texts include slave narratives by Harriet Jacobs and William Wells Brown; turn-of-the-century writing by Georgia Douglas Johnson, W.E.B. DuBois, and Charles Chesnutt; novels by Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, and plays by Amiri Baraka and Adrienne Kennedy. We conclude with contemporary work by Jeremy O. Harris and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Assignments will focus on the interdisciplinarity of African-American literature, and students will be given interactive assignments like staging a scene on campus.