Fiona Maurissette

In this course, we will examine Black feminist essays and speculative fiction as resources for thinking about the future of feminism and its impact on the broader culture. These texts are helping to shift paradigms of what is understood by the term “feminism”. They also contain critical information that students need not just to survive but thrive in the future. We will discuss how these works offer new ways to think about kinship, gender, reproductive rights, abolition, and representations of selfhood. In addition, they will provide a springboard for looking inward to our own lives and perspectives, as we explore how writing, reading, and action are influenced by the personal. Indeed, if the “personal is political,” as Audre Lorde aptly stated, then what we write from our own experience can shape and change our world.

The Black woman writer's efforts to shape images of herself as Black, as women, and as an artist. The problem of literary authority for the Black woman writer, criteria for a Black woman's literary tradition, and the relation of Black feminism or "womanism" to the articulation of a distinctively Black and female literary aesthetic. (AFR 212 and ENG 279 are cross-listed courses.)

In his seminal work on Black culture and modernity, theorist Paul Gilroy argues, “By directing attention repeatedly towards crossing experiences and translocal histories, the idea of the black Atlantic not only deepens our understanding of modern statecraft, commercial power and their relationship to territory and space, it also summons some of the tough, conceptual problems that can imprison or ossify the idea culture.” In this course, we will examine texts (written, visual, and oral) by Black writers that illuminate Gilroy’s argument about the transatlantic slave trade’s significant impact on shaping the modern world. Our discussions will focus on the lived experience of Black people in the diaspora, particularly their production of culture and identity in colonized spaces. In addition, we will pay close attention to the writers’ conceptualization of Black futurity. Possible writers include: Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde, Mikki Kendall, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Edwidge Danticat, bell hooks, Paul Gilroy, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Gloria Naylor, Dionne Brand, adrienne maree brown, N.K Jemisin, Yaa Gyasi, P. Djèlí Clark, Bernadine Evaristo, and Elizabeth Acevedo.