Department of English

We are still contaminated by the experience of slavery—so argues the Caribbean Canadian poet, essayist, novelist, dramaturge, and lawyer, M. NourbeSe Philip. This experience, she asserts, took “place through a language that was not only experientially foreign, but also etymologically hostile and expressive of the non-being of the African. I would argue further that it is impossible for any language that inherently denies the essential humanity of any group or people to be truly capable of giving voice to the images of experiences of that group without tremendous and fundamental changes within the language itself.”* Taking Philip’s mutligenre work as a point of departure, this seminar explores how writers in the African Diaspora have engaged, challenged, experimented with English and its literary forms to tell “the story that cannot be told yet must be told.”**

Readings include essays, poetry, and novels by Kamau Brathwaite, Countee Cullen, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, M. NourbeSe Philip, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

*“The Absence of Writing or How I Almost Became a Spy”.

**Zong!