AAS 490-000: Senior Seminar: Slavery & Freed. in Af. Amer.C (Spring 2010)

Content: This course begins with the assertion that the experience of African slavery (in the United States and throughout the western hemisphere) was and continues to be a major force in shaping African American culture and political life.  Using five cultural vantage points (histories, first-person accounts, poetry, film, and fiction), this course will examine how African American culture has understood and interpreted the experience of slavery and its residual effects in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  How have individual Africa Americans and African American cultures more generally attempted to assign meaning to the experience of slavery?  What has slavery come to mean well after the fact, and what impact has it had or does it continue to have up to and through the present moment?

Required Texts:

Biography of a Runaway Slave, Miguel Barnet

The Farming of Bones, Edwidge Danticat

Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria De Jesus, Carolina Maria De Jesus

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass

Thomas and Beulah, Rita Dove

John Brown, W.E.B. Du Bois

Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs

The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James

The Known World, Edward P. Jones

Autobiography of a Slave, Juan Francisco Manzano

Beloved, Toni Morrison