ENGL 6651 - The Harlem Renaissance

(crosslisted)
(also AMST 6651, ASRC 6651)

Spring. 4 credits.

G. Hutchinson.

This seminar will explore a movement that helped establish the varied institutional, ideological, and aesthetic trajectories of most African American creative writing of the twentieth century while profoundly influencing transatlantic black intellectual work generally. Major issues include the historicity of race and its relationship to place, theories of diaspora, the uses of the “folk” in modernism, the relationship between nationalism, sexuality, and racial identity in the United States; and modernist exchanges between Paris and New York, Harlem and Greenwich Village, black popular culture and “high art.” Secondary work will include recent scholarship on the movement as well as on diaspora theory and literary modernism. Students will be encouraged to think outside the usual boundaries used to frame the movement in time and space.