Postmodernism and African-American Literature
Salamishah Tillet profile
W 3-6
Since the 1970’s, there has been a proliferation of African-American literary texts which take slavery as their central theme. These “neo-slave narratives” bear significant features frequently associated with the postmodern aesthetic such as indeterminacy, self-reflexivity, and unrepresentability (to name a few) while they also respond to and wrestle with post-Civil Rights anxieties about legal desegregation, affirmative action, and civic membership.
Riffing off Anthony Appiah’s well-known essay “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Postmodern?” this class will focus on “neo-slave narratives” to similarly ask: What is the relationship, if any, between the 'Post' in 'Post-Civil Rights' and the 'Post' in 'Postmodern' in African-American literature? In order to grapple with this question, we shall focus on texts by Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, Haile Gerima, Rita Dove, Kara Walker, Octavia Butler, Wynton Marsalis, and Charles Johnson and foreground our theoretical approach in works by Jacques Lyotard, Linda Hutchinson, Cornel West, bell hooks, Wahneema Lubiano, Greg Tate, Marc Anthony Neal, Phillip Brian Harper, and Madhu Dubey.
updated 2008-04-09
