African American Literature: African American Writers Since the Harlem Renaissance

3 units

African American literature in the 20th and 21st centuries grew from a renaissance in Harlem into a world-shaping institution. Public enemies and Nobel prize winners; card-carrying Communists, rock-ribbed Republicans, and Black Power nationalists; Broadway playwrights, Book-of-the-Month Club novelists, and a duly elected U.S. president are among the authors we will study with special attention to the intimate link between black writing and black music. Aiming at chronological and stylistic breadth, the syllabus will begin with poet Alice Dunbar Nelson (born 1875) and end with novelist Colson Whitehead (born 1969), with an array of better-known names - W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison - coming in between. Assignments will consist of two papers, one presentation, and one exam.