GOVT 4706 - The Black Trans-Atlantic

(crosslisted) AMST 4706
(CA-AS)

Fall. 4 credits.

D. Rubenstein.

The Black Trans-Atlantic examines moments of trans-Atlantic and cultural crossing between African American artists, writers and intellectuals (James Weldon Johnson, Josephine Baker, Countee Cullen, Chester Himes, James Baldwin, Richard Wright) and their French counterparts in the 20th century (Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Franz Fanon, Jean Genet.) Our focus includes the interwar years, the immediate post World War II period and the sixties. The seminar is at once a construction of the intellectual history of both America and France as well as an interrogation of racial and sexual identity, national identity, the experience of exile and diasporic thinking. (AM)