Black American Poets

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

Black American Poetics: Forms and Freedoms (Graduate Seminar) This course explores the cultural, political, and theoretical interventions of Black poets in the Americas. Taking up a range of poetic forms from the 18th century through the present (with a focus on the 20th and 21st-centuries), we will consider key questions that have animated the English-language works of Black poets in North America and the Caribbean. How do Black poets explore political and social life in various historical and geographical contexts? How do they use particular poetic strategies (for example, form poetry, free verse, narrative poetry, and experimental modes) to interrogate notions of Blackness and freedom? How do political movements around gender, class, race, and sexuality factor in? As we explore these questions, we will take up important critical and theoretical discourses from Black cultural studies, diaspora studies, gender and sexuality studies, and queer theory, examining how both well-known and underexplored poets use form to complicate Blackness and imagine various forms of freedom. Poets explored will include foundational voices such as Philis Wheatley, Frances E.W. Harper, Langston Hughes, Angelina Weld Grimke, Richard Bruce Nugent, Amiri Baraka, and Audre Lorde, as well as more contemporary figures like Claudia Rankine, Jericho Brown, Staceyann Chin, Cameron Awkward-Rich, Missy Elliott, and Janelle Monáe. Our work will take us through several genres and media forms, including print works, performance poetry, film, hip hop, visual poetry, and digital media. We will explore these texts alongside theoretical perspectives from Lorde. Rich, Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, June Jordan, Meta Jones, Omise’eke Tinsley, and others. Throughout our analysis, we will consider how discourses on gender, sexuality, class, race, and national and transnational belonging shape Black poetic expression, both historically and in the present moment. Assignments include in-class presentations, a short paper, a final project, and optional short creative works.