In focusing exclusively on works produced by African Americans, this course seeks both to demonstrate the contributions of Black artists to the composite of American culture and to explore some ways in which these works create a parallel tradition of their own. Clearly, in a single semester, we can examine only a sample of the available material, but our sample is broad-based and representative, including prose fiction, poetry, autobiography, and other media. The thematic emphasis of the course centers on the processes of self-identification and self-representation by African Americans. These processes are inevitably—and interestingly—multi-faceted, since self-identification and self-representation have both individual and collective (or communal) dimensions, and because they are likely to have reference points in both a specifically African-American culture and in the surrounding Euro-American one. The largely chronological arrangement of our texts—from the 1840s to the 2000s—is designed to make it easier to see links between the concerns and even the forms of cultural expression and the surrounding historical, sociological, and political circumstances.
