Black Noir

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

In the summer of 1946 French cinemas were flooded with the likes of The Maltese Falcon, Laura, and The Woman in the Window, films that had been delayed for international distribution because of the war. When Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton saw these American films made during the war, the critics decided that the films and their characters were "black" or "dark," thus defining the genre as film noir. In this genre, the mostly white characters occupy an indeterminate space, commit moral transgressions, and border on nihilism. In discussions of the noir genre, films and novels by and/or about black people are marginalized. Novels such as Chester Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go or Donald Goines's Never Die Alone complicate the genre because the works are black in ideology and essence. These characters do not need to fall from grace to be black, they are black and, consequently, the pursuit of duplicitous lifestyles in black noir works tends to highlight the social injustices black Americans suffer in America making many black noir titles protests against mainstream white America as well.In this course, we will study black American literature that focuses the noir genre on black people themselves. Gritty, urban crime novels that attempt to expose inequities in black American lives and dispel the notion that a descent from whiteness results in blackness. Rather, the black people in these texts exist in darkness because they are living in alienated communities. We shall investigate how the noir genre is altered when "noirs" are the subjects and the authors. In addition to primary texts, the course will also engage critical responses to these works.