"Post Soul Blackness" - Studies in American Literature
- Alexander G Weheliye
- Kresge Centennial Hall 2-425 - Tu 2:00PM - 5:00PM
- Popular discourses about the `post-racial' era notwithstanding, race still suffuses many aspects of culture and policy in the western world, especially blackness. Moreover, critical arguments about the ways gender, sexuality, class, and nationality fracture race, have questioned unitary notions of blackness. Why does blackness still persist despite these challenges? How is this category continually reconstituted through social, economic, cultural, legal, political, etc. discourses and institutions?
This course will investigate the utility and limitation of blackness as a category of critical analysis for contemporary social formations. To this end, we will discuss recent considerations of the significant changes black culture has undergone in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement and decolonization. We will also study literary and scholarly works that address, on the one hand, the continued significance of slavery, colonialism, and segregation in the present moment, and, on the other hand, texts that imagine future forms of blackness. - Permission of English Department required
- Readings might include works by Cathy Cohen, Mark Anthony Neal, Zadie Smith, Michelle Alexander, Stuart Hall, Fred Moten, Hortense Spillers, Kodwo Eshun, Patricia Hill Collins, Paul Gilroy, Katherine McKittrick, Colin Dayan, Paul Beatty, Imani Perry, Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Saidiya Hartman, Cedric Robinson, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Edouard Glissant, Richard Iton, Greg Tate, Karla Holloway, Jared Sexton, and Sylvia Wynter
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Current as of 05/03/13 01:02:48 PM