AFRST-282 Passing Down: Slavery and Its Afterlives
Kinship, in African American literary traditions, is anything but unmediated terrain, encompassing a range of concerns around remembrance, inheritance, and history. In the afterlife of slavery, what is at stake in the task of “passing-down” is more than the cataloguing of harms. From 19th-century slave narratives to 21st-century speculative fiction, black writers imbricate and thus bring into different existence our presents, pasts, and futures. This course explores how various traditions of African American and Black Atlantic writing, more broadly, disorder the conventional limits of kinship to articulate unique formal and temporal modes of being-together. Our study will constellate several genres alongside literary theory and criticism, engaging writers like Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs, Robert Hayden, Toni Morrison, Christina Sharpe, and more.
Standard Course (40)
Credits
1
Cross Listed Courses
LIT-282
Prerequisite
One course in Literature or Africana Studies
Notes