This seminar is designed to provide English majors with intensive and closely supervised work in critical reading and writing. Although sections of the course may address any literary question, period, or genre, they all provide an introduction to critical and methodological problems in literary studies.

An introduction to Black diasporic criticism, this seminar uses various angles of approach toward notions of the spirit, the haunt, and the possession to explore a tradition of Black literary experiment in Atlantic history. We will study fiction, memoir, artifacts from the visual and anthropological archive, and examples from popular culture--a range of genres that suggests something of the multi-modal techniques of Black literary study. With its focus on shifting landscapes, spatial intimacies, scrambled temporalities, and hybridities of all kinds, Black diasporic criticism resonates richly with the metaphorical wanderings of the ghostly. By traversing the myriad crossings of the haunt and the possession, we focus our analytical view on certain disavowals within cultural traditions and on their powerful re-assertions. For if a ghostly haunt may speak to that which is denied, then a spirit acknowledged can function as a welcome guest—as in the myriad Black cultural practices that involve the embodiment of immaterial energies. By thinking about these religious and spiritual practices of spirit possession, we put colonial and postcolonial positionalities into dialogue, observing profound shifts in knowledge, power, and agency. Course assignments will be geared towards developing skills and ideas over the entire course of the semester and they will range from the brief and exploratory to substantial immersion in a key text. This class satisfies the Literatures in English requirement for the English major.

Book List:

Toni Morrison, Beloved; M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong; Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea; Mati Diop, Atlantics; Rebecca Hall, Passing. Additional readings by authors including Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Hazel Carby, Edward Said, amongst others.

Repeat Rules

Requirements class fulfills