Undergraduate Course: The Black Atlantic (ENLI10183)
Course Outline
School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 4 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
Summary | A study of racial discourse in American and British literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. In particular, the role of 'race' in constructions of modernity and identity will be evaluated. |
Course description |
This course will map the ways in which ¿words are weapons¿ and ¿language is a power¿ for Black women and men, enslaved and free, who worked with pioneering literary forms, radical textual discourses, and experimental formal practices in order to visualise ¿black¿ to white supremacy and dominant hegemonic power and do justice to invisibilised lives. The key themes of this course include the following: aesthetic innovation; formal radicalism; race and racism; identity; slavery; abolition; gender; sexuality; white supremacy; discrimination; lynching; dystopia and utopia; resistance; and the unfolding of memory. The focus of this course is on developing new analytical tools in which to examine a Black Atlantic tradition of activism and artistry and on understanding the interrelation between the modern nation state and white supremacy whilst tracking the still unfolding legacies of individual and institutionalised racism.
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Course Delivery Information
Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
Ability to apply a theoretical literary model across disparate texts. Increased knowledge and understanding of transatlantic cultural formations. Enhanced understanding of 'race' as a constructed social/literary category
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Reading List
Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince (1831)
Mary Seacole, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1857)
William and Ellen Craft, Running A Thousand Miles (1860)
Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)
Ida B. Wells: The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Campaigner.
Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery (1901)
Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood (1902-3).
Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (1892)
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
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Contacts
Course organiser | Dr Patricia Malone
Tel: (0 131 6)50 8618
Email: Patricia.Malone@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Ms Sheila Strathdee
Tel: (0131 6)50 3619
Email: S.Strathdee@ed.ac.uk |
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