AMST311-12S2 (C) Semester Two 2012
African American Women Writers

Description

This course focuses on the perspectives of African American women, both historical and contemporary.  It addresses the complex interaction of race, gender, and class and how this is represented in both literary and non-literary texts by and/or about African American women.

Learning Outcomes

This is an interdisciplinary course that brings together historical and literary constructions of African American women.  Students will learn how to read literature as historical evidence and, in the process, come to an understanding that historical knowledge is constructed and not a given.  African American women’s writing can be seen as a subversive act of resistance against the misrepresentation of African Americans in “official history”.  In rewriting history through their fiction, African American women novelists write women into history and expose the “intellectual feats” which had to be performed by historians to erase African American women from a society seething with their presence (to paraphrase Toni Morrison).

This course will introduce students to the writings of African American women, a growing body of work that has challenged the way that people, both in the past and present, have conceptualized and misrepresented African American women.  Their writings re-articulate the black female voice of the past and that of the present so that it becomes empowering, constructive and “compellingly human”(Ralph Ellison).

Pre-requisites

Restrictions

Equivalent Courses

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Notes

TERM THREE I.  REPRESENTING SLAVERY

Jul 9

       13 Introduction: Hearing Women’s Words

               No class today.  Lecture will be on Learn  Slavery: an introduction to the “peculiar institution”

       16 Historians on Gender and Slavery
               Reading:
               White, Aren’t I A Woman (1985)
               Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll (1972)

               300 level additional reading:
               Phillips, American Negro Slavery (1918)
               Elkins, Slavery (1956)
               Blassingame, The Slave Community (1974)
               
20 White Sources on Women and Slavery
               Reading:
               Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-39

               300 level additional reading:
               Smedes, Memorials of a Southern Planter (1886)
               Olmsted, Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856)
               Weld, Slavery As It Is (1839)

        23 Fugitive Slave Narratives
               Reading:
               Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)

              300 level additional reading:
              Douglass, Narrative in the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)

 27 Been in the Storm So Long: ex-slave interviews
               Reading:
               Rawick, ed., The American Slave: a composite autobiography (1972)

        30 Beloved
               Reading:
               Beloved

Aug      3 The American Literary Canon
               300 level reading:
               Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)

   6 Beloved
               Reading:
               Beloved

         10 Stage Three Presentations on Beloved


                II.  THE INSIDIOUS LIFE OF JIM CROW

         13 Crossing the Color Line

 17 Discussion of The Help (2011) – film dir. Tate Taylor; novel by Kathryn Stockett



TERM FOUR III. SELF-REPRESENTATIONS

Sept    3     Women in the Civil Rights Movement
                  Screening:  Excerpts from Eyes on the Prize

      7 & 10   “De Mule uh de the World”
                   Reading:
                   Their Eyes Were Watching God

     14 & 17  “To Survive Whole”
                  Reading:
                  The Third Life of Grange Copeland

     21 & 24  The Limits of Intimacy
                  Reading:
                  Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine

Oct  28 & 1  The Sacred Tree
                  Reading:
                  Meridian

             5   Stage Three Presentations

For further information see School of Humanities.