COMP 356
Objects that Speak: Contemporary Engagements with the Archive of American Slavery Fall 2015
Division I
Cross-listed AMST 351 / ENGL 379
This is not the current course catalog

In “The Lives of Infamous Men” Michel Foucault writes about his interest in the individuals he glimpses while reading prison records: “All those lives destined to pass beneath any discourse and disappear without ever having been told were able to leave traces–brief, incisive, often enigmatic–only at the point of their instantaneous contact with power.” Only through these encounters with power are these lives thrust out of anonymity and into the historical record. The writers and artists in this course raise similar concerns about visibility and power as they engage with archives produced by slavery in the US. Students will closely examine work by novelists, critics, theorists, and visual artists who return again and again to several questions about slavery’s material afterlife: Is it possible to reconstitute a history marked by silences, invisibility, and what Orlando Patterson famously calls “social death”? How can we revisit documents like plantation records, slave ship logs, or a racist social-scientific photographs without recapitulating their original violence? How might we appropriate such documents for anti-racist ends? Readings will include literary texts by Octavia Butler, Charles Johnson, Gayle Jones, Toni Morrison, M. Norbese Philip, and Derek Walcott, critical and theoretical writing by Colin Dayan, Darby English, Edouard Glissant, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, and Hortense Spillers. We will also look at visual art by Romare Bearden, Glenn Ligon, Betye Saar, Lorna Simpson, Kara Walker, and Carrie Mae Weems.