This course engages with literature, film and music that feature Black characters migrating between regions, countries and islands. We will study the many media — short stories, blues songs, films, plays and novels — through which African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans represented their movement in time and space from slavery to freedom, from South to North, and from island to mainland, through the 20th century down to the present. Black populations’ encounters with growing cities and new visual technologies, like films and photography, offered migrants numerous cultural experiences and venues for representing the conflicts, opportunities and challenges that accompanied the uprooting of families and traditions. Writers include Paul Laurence Dunbar, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Gloria Naylor and Paule Marshall, among others. Assignments include short responses, in-class presentations, a midterm and final day of class exam. Be prepared to do in-class writing assignments without advance notice.