Race and Erasure: Black Literature

Race and Erasure: Black Literature in the Age of
Ferguson. Open to BFA2, BFA3, and BFA4 students
only. This course will explore a question
suggested by Kenneth Warren in "What Was African
American Literature": What, exactly, is the
"black" in African American writing? Bound up with
this question of identity is a collateral one that
concerns itself in what we might call action: How
do black writers respond to the "post" in the
notion of the "post-racial"? What does all this
mean in the era of post-Ferguson and Black Lives
Matter? How does writing by African Americans
respond to the complexities of this social and
political moment? How do we understand the
relationship between critical aesthetics and
resistance to injustice? To this end, we will look
at a set of literary and critical texts in an
effort to pose these questions within their
artistic and social contexts. Course texts will
include Warren's own seminal essay, along with
works by poets, memoirists, fiction writers, and
playwrights that are responding to contemporary
controversies regarding the life of precarity,
racialized policing, and other symptoms of social
tension and inequality. Hopefully, our inquiry
will by turns clarify and complicate our ideas of
what "black" writing might mean in this moment of
heightened attention to socio-racial conflict and
contestation.