Black Southern Literature

This course will look at the intersection of race, identity, and place as we study the narratives written about the Black Southern Experience. The majority of the texts we study will be literary. However, we will look to Kiese Laymon's essay "Da Art of Storytellin' (A Prequel)" in the Oxford American as inspiration in our understanding of Southern Blackness. Laymon attributes his creative skills and narrative prowess to his grandmother, OutKast, and the lush yet racist Mississippi landscape he calls his ancestral home. Instead of trying to reconcile his conflicting feelings about a region that historically has been so generative and yet so hostile to Black people, Laymon creates art that resides in these contradictions. The legacy of Southern Black creators, from Richard Wright, Alice Walker, and Paul Laurence Dunbar to Donald Glover, Beyonce, and Jericho Brown, is to make art under the duress of a tortured history. Our guiding questions in engaging these texts are: 1. How do artists define Southern Blackness? 2. How do folklore and folk culture coming out of the Southern experience help with articulating a unique American Black identity and culture? 3. How do Black people of the African Diaspora relate to Southern Black rurality? 4. What is the South, the Black South, and finally, the Black Southerner in the cultural imagination of the region, the nation and the world?

Reading List: 

Charles Blow, excerpt from The Devil You Know 

Imani Perry, excerpt from South to America 

Danielle Evans, “Robert E. Lee is Dead” 

Z.Z. Packer, “Brownies” 

Dantiel Moniz, “Outside the Raft” “Thicker Than Water” 

Kiese Laymon, “Black Abundance” from Heavy 

Tressie McMillan Cottom, “Black Is Over, (Or Special Black)” 

Ernest Gaines, “The Sky Is Gray” 

LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) “….Slave and Post-Slave” from Blues People 

Clint Smith, Prologue-“The whole city is a memorial to slavery,”The Whitney Plantation,” “Angola Prison” from How the Word Is Passed 

bell hooks, “Reclamation and Reconciliation,” and “To Be Whole and Holy” 

James Baldwin, excerpt from The Evidence of Things Not Seen 

Alice Walker, “Everyday Use” 

Addie Citchens, “That Girl” 

Natasha Trethewey, “Pastoral” 

Jericho Brown, “The Card Tables” “Duplex” 

Deesha Philyaw, “Peach Cobbler” 

Etheridge Knight, “The Idea of Ancestry” 

Zandria F. Robinson, excerpt from This Ain’t Chicago 

Kevin Young, “Bling Bling Blues” 

Brenda Marie Osby, “Suicide City” 

Randall Kenan, “The Eternal Glory That Is Hamhocks” 

Houston Baker, “A Book of Southern Distinction: The Souls of Black Folk at 100” 

Bryan Washington,”Elgin