ASRC 6511 - [The African Diaspora: Theories and Texts]

(crosslisted) ENGL 6511

Fall. Not offered: 2023-2024. Next offered: 2024-2025. 4 credits. Student option grading.

C. Boyce Davies.

Theories and texts of the African Diaspora have become critically important in intellectual, media and popular communities. Among them, Sylvia Wynter is today considered to be one of the leading theorists of the Black experience. As this applies in general to African Diaspora Studies, her work has “revitalized philosophical debates across Black Studies, critical ethnic studies, postcolonial criticism and black feminist theory around both the historical project of decolonization and the ontological status of blackness in the modern world.” (Cunningham, 119). This semester’s course in African Diaspora Texts and Theories will study all the available works of Wynter (early and late essays, novel, plays, interviews) in relation to a selection of the writers of the Caribbean and larger Black radical intellectual tradition with whom she is in conversation. We will also examine some of the critical responses emanating from her work as well as some of the recently uncovered texts like “Black Metamorphosis.”