Professor: Courtney Thorsson

4.00 credits

CRN 12303: Tuesday & Thursday, 10:00-11:50am @ PLC 184

Graduation Requirement:  This class will fulfill an Arts and Letters Colloquium and the HC 444H: US: Difference, Inequality, and Agency (US) cultural literacy requirement.  If a student already has completed an Arts and Letters Colloquium, this course will fulfill both of the following requirements: an Elective Colloquium and the US: Difference, Inequality, and Agency (US) cultural literacy requirement.

In this course, we will study works from the vast body of Black feminist literature. Our texts will be by African American women writers, activists, teachers, and intellectuals and will span the late-nineteenth century to the present. Our readings will be diverse in form and genre, including poetry, fiction, manifestos, and scholarly essays from a variety of disciplines. What will unite our readings is their shared investment in Black women's liberation. Authors whose works we may read include Frances Harper, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Cade Bambara, Audre Lorde, Michele Wallace, Ntozake Shange, June Jordan, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Angela Davis. We will read these women's works closely, studying the formal and thematic traits of every text we encounter. We will examine implicit and explicit theories in our readings of the role of literature in the work of liberation.