ENG 321A - African American Literature 1880s-1940s

Prerequisite, ENG 256. This course offers a survey of African American literature from the 1880s to the 1940s, from Charles Chesnutt’s “Dave’s Neckliss” (1889) to Ann Petry’s “The Street” (1946), from Reconstruction to World War II, with a focus on the essays and editorship of W. E. B. Du Bois and the poetry and fiction of Langston Hughes. The study of the literature of this period-also including Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright-will be complemented with readings that fill in the historical context: on racial segregation, codified in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896); the anti-lynching activism of Ida Wells-Barnett; the controversial act of racial passing; the founding of The Crisis in 1910; the Great Migration, the movement of African Americans from the South to cities in the North and West; and the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, when African American culture (music and dance, etc.) became widely popular and African Americans gained more control over how they were being represented in various media. Letter grade with Pass/No Pass option. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits