AFR 209
Phonographic Visions: Radical Aesthetics in Black Literary Culture Spring 2014
Division II Writing Skills
Cross-listed ENGL 210 / AMST 204
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

You’ve never heard anything like it, but as soon as it finds you it tells you just where you need to be: that’s the sound of radical innovation, which black popular music seems to generate so effortlessly that people were taking it for granted long before hip-hop was born. Sometimes when black literature tries it, people don’t want to hear it, as if the long history of black people writing was elitist and not revolutionary, as if an oral (or aural) tradition wasn’t also a record of recording devices (being scratched or taken for a spin). This course posits a radical impulse in black literary culture, which is sometimes expressed as a political imperative distinct from aesthetics, as an aesthetic imperative out beyond politics, or as an intellectual inquiry or visionary pursuit of wisdom that ransacks all the disciplines and traditions of institutionalized knowledge. We will approach black writing as an interdisciplinary enterprise crossing multiple media, leaning toward what Fred Moten calls “the ensemble of the senses.” Materials will be drawn from writers, critics, visual artists, and musicians, such as Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Nathaniel Mackey, Gayl Jones, Harryette Mullen, Kevin Young, Jacob Lawrence, Greg Tate, Julie Dash, Cauleen Smith, or others.
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 19
Expected: 19
Class#: 3682
Grading: yes pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: active class participation and four or five short essays, totaling about 20-25 pages
Prerequisites: a 100-level ENGL course, or a score of 5 on the AP English Literature exam, or a score of 6 or 7 on the Higher Level IB English exam
Enrollment Preferences: first-year students, sophomores, English majors who have yet to take a Gateway and Africana Studies concentrators
Distributions: Division II Writing Skills
Notes: meets Division 1 requirement if registration is under ENGL; meets Division 2 requirement if registration is under AFR or AMST
This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
ENGL 210 Division I AMST 204 Division II AFR 209 Division II
Attributes: ENGL Criticism Courses
ENGL 200-level Gateway Courses

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