This course examines the form and function of African-American historical narratives with attention to written texts pertaining to the enslavement and freedom of African Americans during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The lack of documentary material pertaining to this history has made the task of reading and interpreting African-American experience particularly challenging. By crossing generic and disciplinary boundaries, students will take up the task of reading African-American history while attending to the difficulties such a task raises. To do so, we will read both historical and fictional narratives that raise explicitly the problems of writing African-American history.
In the first part of the course, we will discuss selected texts (fiction, narrative, and historiography) from the antebellum era in order to schematize the literature of slavery. In the second half of the course, we will take up the discourse of freedom that followed the Emancipation Proclamation. Readings will include works by Booker T. Washington, James Weldon Johnson, Charles Chesnutt, Harriet Wilson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sutton Griggs. In addition, we will read historiography on African American slavery, freedom, and urbanization.