June Jordan and the Poetics of Resistance

Undergraduate

June Jordan was one of the most prolific American authors of the twentieth century. A second-generation Jamaican/Panamanian immigrant, Jordan was an award-winning poet and essayist whose poetry, nonfiction, fiction, and drama reflected her urgent analyses of domestic and foreign politics. And despite Jordan’s prolific output—she published 28 works in her lifetime—criticism has lagged behind her achievement. This course engages a deep study of Jordan’s body of work. Seeking to understand Jordan’s writings in the context of the major social and political upheavals of the century, we analyze Jordan’s poetics of resistance—her manipulation of meter and voice to make her work responsive to social movements around the world, from the United States to Central American to the Occupied Palestinian Territories—across genres. The course may include travel to the Schlesinger Library at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. WR , HU M 1:30pm-3:25pm