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This course allows students to read a selection of texts that offer understandings of the importance of skin color for the literary Black body. Together we will identify recurring literary “tropes of color,” from bi-racial “tragic mulatto/a” characters who may be simultaneously “passing” for white and struggling with their sense of identity, to the plights of dark-skinned Black men and women in a society adhering to the slogan “white is right, black get back.” Overall, this course will raise awareness for colorism as a specific form of racism within communities of color, putting a focus on representations of skin color in African American literature. Among the fictional texts studied are novels, short stories, poems, and plays by William Wells Brown, Pauline Hopkins, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, Dael Orlandersmith, and Danzy Senna.
Course Readings:
In addition to purchasing the novels on the reading list (t.b.a.) there will be a course reader with shorter fiction, selected poems, and relevant theoretical readings. This reader will be made available for pick-up at the NamLitCult office.
Course Requirements:
Regular attendance, active participation in class, timely completion of reading and writing assignments, short oral presentation (discussion facilitation), graded term paper/final written exam (depending on your Studienordnung). |
