ENGL 537 A: Topics in American Studies

This course provides a brief introduction to the texts, arguments, and debates that have shaped the field of Black literary and cultural studies in the U.S. during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Our focus will be on parsing out the stakes of key interventions in the field, along with the field’s engagement with salient theoretical frameworks: structuralism and poststructuralism, feminism, and queer theory. We will trace a chronology of the field to consider how “Black Studies” currently is legible as an intellectual project that raises historical questions about the formation of blackness in the western modern world.