Reading Race in America

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

The aim of the contemporary cultural studies investigator is not to generate another good theory, but to give a better theorized account of concrete historical reality. --Stuart Hall How do we read race? What interpretive protocols do we use, knowingly and unknowingly? What is the language, grammar and praxis of race? In this course, we will examine race in American culture, specifically as constructed in texts by Anglo-American and African American writers from 1845 to the present in our quest to understand better the cultural, social and political significance of race in American society. In 1903, W.E.B. DuBois wrote that the problem of the twentieth century in the United States would be race, or as he put it, “the color line.” This metaphor of linearity ironically represents the demarcating nature of race as constructed, employed, and deployed in the US. We will be particularly interested in how the symbiotic binary of black and white signifies, symbolizes and reifies social and cultural aspirations, interests and conflicts as depicted in the fiction and film. In many ways, the history of the United States and the history of race are mutually constitutive. We will be concerned with how American writers on both sides of the historic color line construct and represent race. By pairing representative texts from nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we will explore how thematically, stylistically, politically, and culturally the narratives speak to each other in their construction of race. We will follow an arc that takes us, in Anglo-American literature, from the seemingly expressive authority in terms of race as encoded in The Scarlet Letter to the lack thereof in Light in August, the stereotypes of race in Crash and the hybridity of race in The Human Stain. Of the African American texts, from Douglass's Narrative to Morrison's A Mercy, we will explore a move from codified physical bondage to the afterlives of bondage as well as liberatory resilience. Our primary tools of inquiry will be critical race theory (CRT), Black feminist theory, and performance theories. Readings/viewings may include works by F. Douglass, N. Hawthrone, F.S. Fitzgerald, N. Larsen, T. Morrison, L. Hansberry, J. Baldwin, P. Roth, and Jordan Peele.