In this course, students investigate the way literature and other art forms have both represented the diversity of the United States and shaped conceptions of diversity. English 166AC provides students with an opportunity to deepen and complicate their appreciation of the way fictions make meaning, shape our understanding and experience of the world, and transform society. Topics vary from term to term and might focus on a form (e.g. "Race and Ethnicity in American Cinema"), a literary historical period (e.g. "Race and Revision in Early America"), or a concept (e.g. nationhood in "Literatures of the Asian Diaspora in America").

In this course, we will read both historical and literary texts to explore how racial categories came into being in New World cultures, and how these categories were tested, inhabited, and re-imagined by the human actors they sought to define. Our study will be organized around three early American sites and how they have been remembered and reinterpreted over time: Pocahontas at Jamestown, Witchcraft at Salem, and Jefferson’s Virginia. In each place, African, Native, and European ways of making meaning radically collided and concepts of racial difference were created and concretized. The effect, of course, was never total, and we will study how that slippage and excess de-stabilized these histories, which are still under revision today. This class satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major. This class satisfies the Literatures in English requirement for the English major.

Book List:

Brown, W.W. Clotel
Cesaire ,A. A Tempest
Conde, M. I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem
Jefferson, T. Notes on the State of Virginia
Morrison, T. A Mercy
Shakespeare, W. The Tempest
A Course Reader

Repeat Rules

Requirements class fulfills