AAAS 79B /1
AAAS 79B
African American Literature of the Twentieth Century
Spring 2015
Tue/Fri: 9:30-10:50 am in Mandel G-11
ProfessorFaith Smith
Mandel217 Ext: 6-2094
Office Hours: Tues 11-2 and by appointment
Why did "sounding like a Negro" become central to modernist aesthetics in the 1920s, what did African American writers think about this, and what does the celebration and appropriation of a perceived black soundor black lookmean for notions of art, power, and identity across the twentieth century and beyond? Can the sonnet be an appropriate aesthetic vehicle for protest? In this course we will consider, among other issues: the tension between the power to consume and the perception that one is an object of consumption; shifting and contradictory perceptions of the African continent; how U.S. military power in Haiti and elsewhere shaped and undermined diasporic affiliation; the perception that global ideas about blackness are unfairly dominated by US-born African Americans; the deep discomfort about the ways in which women's intellectual authority, sexuality, and desires have been perceived to undermine communal struggles for respectable citizenship.African American writers have registered both desire for and anxieties about "the masses and their popular tastes." Their fiction and poetry represents theU.S. South as the site of violence and painful memories, on the one hand, and of spiritual sustenance on the other.They are deeply ambivalent about middle-class aspirations and suburban prosperity. They resist but also share racist ideas about African American family life, "responsible" citizenship, and hyper-sexuality.Their work explores the pleasures and dangers of revolution and violence, of disappointment and resignation. As our contempary moment searches for incisive and visionary solutions to the urgentquestions of our time, we will see how twentieth-century writers' considerations and solutions were similar to or differed from both their twenty-first-century andtheir pre-20th-century counterparts.
By the end of the course, you will have:
a) basic skills in reading fiction and poetry;
b) an understanding of the role of aesthetics in cultural nationalist and diasporic arenas, andin debates about identity and power;
c) practice in reading critically, and in writing forcefully and imaginatively.
Your final grade is based on the following requirements:
Participationattendance; readings with you in class; thoughtful participation; writing exercises20%
two oral presentations one 5-min guide to that day's reading; one 10-min presentation10%
3-page paperdue on Feb 410%
two five-page papers due on Mar 26 and Apr 2040%
final 8-10-page paper due on May 5 ( short Outline due just before second Break 20%
This course fulfillsHumanities, Social Science, and Writing Intensive requirements.
At the heart of our analysis are the following novels, which we will consider alongside short fiction, poetry, blues lyrics, and films available on LATTE. These novels
have been ordered from the campus bookstore. You are expected to have them with you in class on the days they are assigned:
Pauline Hopkins Of One Blood (1903)
Claude McKay Home to Harlem (1928)
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
Paule Marshall, Brown Girl Brownstones (1959)
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (1977)
Trey Ellis, Platitudes (1988)
You must complete all assignments to pass the course. Instructions for written assignments will be posted to LATTE. As with all aspects of the course, if anything is unclear, you should let me know as soon as possible.In-class writing exerciseswill be part of your participation grade. You can rewrite two of the first three papers, with the better of two grades counting as the final grade for each rewritten paper. You are expected to turn in your written assignments on time. Think of the timing of each paper as part of the assessment itself; the due date tests your ability to consolidate your ideas in an alloted time. Late papers are docked a level (B becomes B-) for each day they are late. If you consult with me no less than 24 hours before a paper is due you can turn in the paper after the due date (it will still receive the late penalty), but I will not accept it beyond two weeks after the original due date. Please give yourself enough time to write drafts of each paper. I encourage you to take notes in class, as well as when you prepare the readings on your own. These notes will be an important resource for your assignments. Consult LATTE frequently for assigned readings, for instructions on writing assignments and oral presentations, and for any possible changes to the syllabus,
You should attend both sessions every week: we are creating a community in which we listen carefully to each other's ideas and make connections across the semester's readings.
Constant movement in and out of the room undermines the intellectual community we are trying to create, as does the frequent checking of devices. Unless specifically required for the readings from LATTE or for note-taking, you should make sure that all devices are switched off. Please let me know if you are using an electronic device for readings in class. Using devices for reasons other than class participation is disruptive and disrespectful, and it will affect your attendance grade for that day.
Three or more unexcused absences will affect your grade significantly, and I will ask you to consider dropping the course. Please tell me at the beginning of the semester about religious or athletic exemptions. You should show me documentation from athletic or medical personnel when you are absent for those reasons.
If you have questions about documenting a disability or requesting academic accommodations, you should contact Beth Rodgers-Kay in Academic Services (x6-3470 or .) Letters of accommodation should be presented at the start of the semester to ensure provision of accommodations: they cannot be granted retroactively.
If you are not certain about how to acknowledge others’ ideas, please see me, but in general, when you are unsure, you should cite your source. Plagiarism is a serious offence and will be penalized:
If you are a graduate student please see me about additional readings, assignments, and meetings.
Reading Schedule:
Please prepare readings carefully and have them with you in class.Keep checking LATTE for changes.
Remember that you have to prepare a 19th- or 21st-century text for your third written assignment, due April 20. You can begin to think about this now.
You are responsible for introducing a session's readings once this semester, in a 5-minute presentation, and I will distribute a sign-up sheet soon; instructions will be on LATTE.
Tue 1/13: Introduction
Fri 1/16: Saidiya Hartman, "In the Dungeon" (for these and others see LATTE)
Stuart Hall, "Minimal Selves"
(please begin your reading ofOf One Blood this first week)
Tue 1/20:Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood 1-69
Hazel Carby, "Women's Era"
Fri 1/23:Of One Blood 71-148
William James, "The Hidden Self" (1890)
W. E. B. DuBois, "Of Our Spiritual Strivings" (1903)
Tue 1/27:Of One Blood 149-193 and v-xxi
Fri 1/30:Paul Lawrence Dunbar, "We Wear the Mask" and "Ode to Ethiopia"
Claude McKay, "Midnight Woman" and "If We Must Die"
Michael North, "Against the Standard" (Sections 1, 2, 4)
Please watch the film The Jazz Singer in preparation for today
The "New Negro": the 1920s
Tue 2/3: Claude McKay, Home to Harlem, Part 1 (to end of "Jake Makes a Move" 119)
Blues lyrics on LATTE
DuBois, “Criteria of Negro Art”
Angela Davis, from “I Used to be Your Sweet Mama”
Mary Renda from Taking Haiti
Wed 2/4:Three-page paper putting an assigned passage of fiction or a poemin dialogue with an assigned essay on aesthetics: check for instructions on LATTE. This is one of two papers you are allowed to re-write.
Fri 2/6:Home to Harlem 123-229, chaps X-XV (10-15)
DuBois, “Two Novels”; Alain Locke, “The New Negro”
Tue 2/10:Home to Harlem chap XV1 to the end
Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”
George Schuyler, “The Negro-Art Hokum”
Fri 2/13:Richard Nugent, “Smoke, Lilies and Jade”
Essex Hemphill, "Loyalty"
Please watch the film Looking for Langston
Midterm Recess: No classes Feb 17 and Feb 20
Black Lives Matter: Protest, 1950s-Style
Tue 2/24:Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man 3-108 (up to end of chap 4)
Please watch the films Birth of A Nation and Within Our Gates
Fri 2/27: Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man 109-230 (chaps 5-10)
Tue 3/3:Invisible Man 231-382 (chaps 11-17)
Fri 3/6:Invisible Man complete your reading of the novel
Tue 3/10:Gwendolyn Brooks, “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon,” and “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till”
Fri 3/13:Paule Marshall, Brown Girl Brownstones to 129 (chaps1-5)
Tue 3/17:Brown Girl Brownstones 130-236 (up to end of 5th chap in Part 2)
Fri 3/30:Brown Girl Brownstones complete your reading of the novel
Devon Carbado, "Racial Naturalization"
"Invisible" to Whom? The 1960s and 1970s
Tue 3/24:Poetry of Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni
Addison Gayle, Jr. “The Function of Black Literature at the Present Time”
Gil Scott Heron, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"
Thu 3/26:Five-page paper comparing aesthetic issues facing writers in the first three decades of the 20th century,and later on.Rewrite permitted.
Fri 3/27:Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon 1-90 (chaps 1-3)
Tue 3/31:Song of Solomon 90-216 (to end of Part 1)
Susan Willis, "I Shop Therefore I Am"
Please view the film Daughters of the Dust
Passover and Spring Recess: April 3-10
Tue 4/14:Song of Solomon (complete your reading of the novel)
Trey Ellis, "The New Black Aesthetic" (in 2003 ed. Platitudes 185-203)
Fri 4/17:Trey Ellis, Platitudes 2-105 (chaps 1-28)
Krista Thompson, "The Sound of Light"
Mon Apr 20: 5-page paper comparing a 20th-century literary text with either a 19th-century or a 21st-century literary text. Rewrite permitted.
Tue 4/21:Platitudes (complete reading of the novel)
Fri 4/24:10-min oral presentations based on second five-page paper
Tue 4/28: presentations not yet delivered
May 5: Final 8-10-page paper due on a topic of your choice, based on the semester's readings. Please let me know your topic and thesis before you leave for the Passover and Spring Recess (in a short Outline: instructions will be on LATTE). You are allowed to include material from a previous paper, though it should be substantially reconceptualized. Make sure that you include an extended analysis of one assigned novel that you have not yet used in your previous written assignments.
Class Handout, January 13.
For me, returning to the source didn’t lead to the great courts and to the regalia of kings and queens. The legacy that I chose to claim was articulated in the ongoing struggle to escape, stand down, and defeat slavery in all of its myriad forms. It was the fugitive’s legacy. It didn’t require me to wait on bended knee for a great emancipator. It wasn’t the dream of a White House, even if it was in Harlem, but of a free territory. It was a dream of autonomy rather than nationhood. It was the dream of an elsewhere, with all its promises and dangers, where the stateless might, at last, thrive.
Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother 234
There are at least two different ways of thinking about “cultural identity.” The first position defines “cultural identity” in terms of one, shared culture, a sort of collective “one true self,” hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed “selves,” which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common….There is, however, a second, related by different view of cultural identity. This second position recognizes that, as well as the many point of similarity, there are also critical points of deep and significant difference which constitute “what we really are”; or rather – since history has intervened – “what we have become.”
Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” 21-23
"….We won't pretend like we don't like hot sauce; and we won't pretend like we don't like chicken. We won't try and dress up in suits to make you comfortable so you'll talk to us, so you'll try and understand us." (Participant in demonstration in Ferguson, MO, Nov 25, 2014)
If We Must Die
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
Claude McKay 1919