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AFROAM 345. Southern Literature
4 credits (AL,DU)
Professor Smethurst
MW 2:30-3:45 p.m.
This course offers an introduction to Southern Black Literature through a sampling of classic texts and more recent prose and poetry. In addition to surveying a rich canon of literature that has its origins in the antebellum slave narrative tradition, we will also study: (1) networks, alliances, and patterns of migration connecting the U.S. South and the Global South (especially the Caribbean); (2) black queer and trans life in the South; (3) recent film and television set in the Deep South; (4) structures and experiences of dispossession and poverty. We will also look at media coverage and scholarship to explore struggles happening in the South right now, especially movements around armed self-defense/community policing; cooperative farming and economic self-determination; disaster capitalism and environmental dispossession in places like the Gulf Coast and in Puerto Rico; the toppling/removal of Confederate statues and fight against white supremacist organizations and activities.