This course will cover a wide range of literary texts from the early part of the nineteenth century to the Harlem Renaissance. As a class, we will study texts from a variety of genres as we seek to understand the ways that Black people conceived of race and identity in the early part of the nation’s founding. We will discuss the ways that African Americans dealt with existential issues like the concept of blackness as a cultural and political idea, both in fiction and non-fiction writing. The themes we will explore this semester, therefore, will include identity, citizenship, and belonging, evolving representations of gender and sexuality, and activist and aesthetic responses to institutional and extra-legal violence. 

Excerpt: Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey

Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection

“Criteria of Negro Art,” W.E.B. DuBois

“On Imagination,” Phillis Wheatley

“The New Negro”-Alain Locke

“Characteristics of Negro Expression,” Zora Neale Hurston

Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois

Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington

“Africa for Africans,” “The Future As I See It,” Marcus Garvey

“ A Red Record,” “The Remedy”, Ida B. Wells-Barnett

Twelve Years a Slave, Solomon Northup

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Olaudah Equiano

My Bondage and My Freedom, Frederick Douglass

“Ain’t I a Woman” Sojourner Truth

“Womanhood a Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of the Race,” Anna Julia Cooper

“I Sit and Sew,” Alice Dunbar Nelson

“ A Double Standard,” Francis W. Harper

“The Wife of His Youth,”

“The Goophered Grapevine” Charles Chestnutt

“When Malindy Sings”

“Her Thought and His”

“We Wear the Mask,” Paul Laurence Dunbar

Passing, Nella Larsen

Cane, Jean Toomer