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Songs of the Underground: Introduction of African American Literature

ENGL 081.401
also offered as: AFRC 081
instructor(s):
TR 12-1:30 pm

In 1979, a retrospective James Baldwin wrote "Music is our witness, and our ally. The beat is the confession which recognises, changes and conquers time." Here, Baldwin embodies an African American literary practice that values music as a space of self-fashioning, resistance and occasionally, racial transcendence.  In this course, we will examine the manner in which African American writers, such as Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, and Paul Beatty, have turned to musical practices, from the sorrow songs to jazz, from European classical music to hip hop, as an aesthetic blueprint and political alternative.  We will also read music history and criticism in order to examine the tensions and slippages between these literary representations of music and the actual histories of African-American musicians and challenges posed for black musical production.

fulfills requirements
Sector 2: Difference and Diaspora of the Standard Major
Sector 6: 20th Century Literature of the Standard Major
Cultural Diversity in the US of the College's General Education Curriculum