AFR 401 - James Baldwin

At In this seminar devoted to the work of James Arthur Baldwin, we read, analyze, and discuss a selection of his essays, novels, poetry, and plays. We will focus attention to the ways in which Baldwin critiqued the United States as a nation whose dominant cultural and political self-understanding is predicated upon its innocence and disavowal of racism while articulating the cultural complexities of love, fugitivity, and hope that serve as both forces of identity formation and resistance to dehumanization among black folk in the United States. In addition, we will engage in speculative comparison by thinking about Baldwin’s writing in relation to thinkers and artists writing toward and from the milieu of struggles for liberation outside of the United States. For example, how might we think about Baldwin’s writings about black American life and experience in relation to, for example, Edouard Glissant’s The Ripening (1958), which is set in Martinique or to Sylvia Wynter’s The Hills of Hebron (1962), which is set in Jamaica. In addition, we will think about how Baldwin imagined the relation between the labor of the artist to the struggle for liberation that emerged from the context of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement in relation to artistic movements linked to anti-colonial liberation struggles (e.g., Negritude) happening simultaneously to the Civil Rights Movement in the Caribbean and Africa. Fulfills a requirement for Africana Studies Certificate, American Studies Concentration and Hemispheric and Transnational Studies Concentrations. This course counts towards the WGS certificate.
Units: 4
Course Type: Seminar