This course aims to create a liberatory space with graduate students to ask critical questions about form, media and genre within Black Feminist work. We will encounter artistic & literary works and accompanying theory & literary criticism, works that are now considered foundational to the field (including the work of Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton and Octavia Butler) . We will also engage newer 21st century works that build on these “foremother theorists” (including Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Afia Atakora, Kara Keeling and Marquis Bey). The course is organized into four units: 1) Beginnings, 2) Ancestors, 3) Land & the Human, and 4) Queer Visions. These units will allow us to move back and forth between classic texts and cutting edge works. 

This course explores ecocriticism, looking specifically at botanical subjects in literature and critical plant studies. A ‘plant turn’ has been noted in various disciplines including Anthropology and Geography. Additionally, scholars in English studies have long asked questions about plants, empire and British literature, the relationship between plants and the poetic imagination, and more recently, the role of plants in speculative fiction. Critical plant studies (CPS) is a field that sits, as Anna Lawrence writes, “betwixt and between the environmental humanities, plant sciences, art and aesthetics, philosophy and ethics.” We will ask questions about how student scholars in the humanities might craft transdisciplinary, decolonial, and radical botanies to critically engage and redefine our notions of ‘the human’, renew and heal relations to land and spur embodied change toward the more just worlds we desire. Conversely, we will also ask how grounding botanical questions in the critical theory and praxis of the humanities can open us up to epistemologies (beyond Western Science) for collective liberation. Participants in this class community encounter a wide array of texts exploring critical plant studies and literary treatments of botanical subjects. 

The Harlem Renaissance was a movement (called the “New Negro” movement at the time) where there was a tremendous revitalization of Black cultural production, activism and change. Roughly coinciding with the interwar years 1918-1939, though some mark its end with the onset of the great depression, this golden age was a time of inspiring resistance and activism, alongside crushing poverty and racial violence.  We will study the literary arts (poetry, short stories, novels) in this course, but will also spend a significant amount of our time together studying visual art, music and historical context. Ultimately this movement disturbed these boundaries of genre as well as lines of race and gender. Not confined to Harlem, this flowering of Black arts was witnessed across the U.S. in Chicago, Detroit, Washington D.C., and New Orleans, as well as internationally in the Caribbean, various African nations and European cities like Paris. While some scholars of Black literary studies privilege the cultural nationalist writings of the 1920s, we will read these nationalist impulses alongside Black writers of the period who questioned these approaches, taking seriously Anthony Dawahare’s critique of how “the spread of nationalist ideologies and movements during the interwar period, culminating in the Nazi genocide, functioned for a time to divert the legitimate political desires of many black writers for a world without racism along channels that did not throw into question the capitalist foundation of modern racism” (Dawahare, 2003, p. xii). Sometimes people seem confused that all the major players of this movement did not agree. But expecting Black people to all be the same is dehumanizing and just too simple. We will look at the Harlem Renaissance with complexity, refusing to erase differences within Black communities, paying attention to the dynamism of gender, skin tone, sexuality, and class.