Course info

The killing of George Floyd and others including Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery sparked anti-racism protests around the world as many viewers witnessed the shocking videotaped killings of African Americans by U.S. police forces. This course invites students to critically engage with the category of African American Literature to better understand the current Black Lives Matter moment in a longue durée of anti-Black violence and as a paradigmatic moment in the study of American Literature. Students will have the opportunity to engage with African American literary texts such as James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1963), Cornelius Eady's Brutal Imagination (2001), and Jesmyn Ward's The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race  (2016), among others.

The course will be designed as a hybrid online-course using Moodle, which means that there will be a mix of synchronous and asynchronous sessions. Students registered for the course will receive a link to the Moodle-course and further relevant information. Details of the course schedule will be clarified in the first session on November 12, 2020.