Topics in African-American Literature: Black American Writers in the Age of Lynching & Resistance

This course will examine major Black literary works produced between 1880 and 1920, the period the great Howard University historian Rayford Logan called the Nadir of American race relations when lynchings were at their height and segregation and disfranchisement were rigidly enforced. The writers we will read include fiction writer Charles Chesnutt, poet and novelist Paul Laurence Dunbar, poet and novelist James Weldon Johnson, scholar/essayist W.E.B. Du Bois, Tuskegee Institute president, Booker T. Washington, and poet and fiction writer Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, among others. We will also examine some of the Black popular music of this era, particularly the rise of ragtime. How did Black Americans build their own institutions and cultural expressions in light of the virulent racism of this era? For AFAS majors, this course counts as Area Requirement 1.
Course Attributes: EN H; BU Hum; AS HUM; AS LCD; AS SD I; FA HUM; AR HUM; AS SC

Topics in African-American Literature: Black American Writers in the Age of Lynching & Resistance

AFRICAN AND AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDIES 386A

Section 01