AFR 482
Fictions of African-American History Fall 2014
Division II Writing Skills
Cross-listed HIST 482 / AFR 482
This is not the current course catalog

This course examines the form and function of African-American narratives with particular attention to written texts pertaining to the enslavement and freedom of African Americans during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. We will explore the role of books, writing, and reading in the African American South, where the acts of reading and writing had been illegal throughout the Colonial and Antebellum Era. In the course, 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.