This course examines how U.S. cultures are constructed, reinforced, and changed, and how those cultures act simultaneously at a given time. To help students develop skills in cultural analysis, lectures will contrast various methods and perspectives as they apply to the study of a particular year or decade. Topics will vary from semester to semester. This course may include discussion sections depending on available funding. Some versions of this course need four in-class contact hours because of the extensive use of media.

This course explores the social, cultural, and political awakenings in the literature, art, and music of a movement known in its time as the “New Negro” Renaissance, now more commonly known as the Harlem Renaissance. This is remembered as a period (roughly 1918-1930) when, in the midst of legal segregation and increasing anti-Black mob violence, Black American writers, artists, philosophers, activists, and musicians, congregating in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood, reclaimed the right to represent themselves in a wide range of artistic mediums and activist movements. We will read works by Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, and others as we reflect on migration and metropolitan life, primitivism and the avant garde, diaspora and exile, passing and identity, sexuality and secrecy, and the relationship between modern art and folk tradition.

Repeat Rules

Requirements class fulfills