This course provides a selective overview of African American and Black diasporic literature from the 1980s to the present. We will examine a range of formal and thematic developments in contemporary black fiction and poetry, in the context of major cultural, political, and legal developments of the last thirty-five years. Our guiding questions will include the following: What makes a text a black text? Must African American literature serve a moral or political cause? How does today’s African American literature revise, reject, or re-imagine the black literary tradition? How and why has the topic of racial slavery come to occupy a central place in contemporary black literature?

Course Requirements:

Evaluation will be based on active class participation, five or six short homework assignments (1-3 pages each), and a substantive final paper.