Contemporary Black Women's Literature

Examination of black women’s literature in the post- Civil Rights period. Foregrounding complexities of black womanhood, course investigates how black women have used writing to revise history, assert agency, manufacture beauty, and redress personal and group injury. Emphasis on the intersections of precarity and power, race and rebellion, pastness and black feminist futurity within the context of Africana women’s literary legacies. Specific attention paid to the aesthetics of form and the interrelations of race, class, sexuality, generation and nation. Not open to first-year students.