ENG 329-01 - Studies in African American Literature

4 credits (Spring)

Sound Studies & African American Literature. This course focuses on the relationship between Sound Studies and African American literature. Sound Studies methodologies provide a way to chip away at privileged discourses of knowledge. Indeed, Josh Kun argues that “studying sound helps us put an ear to ‘the audio-racial imagination,’ which refers to the aurality of racial meanings, and to sound’s role in systems and institutions of racialization and racial formation within and across the borders of the United States.” Following Kun, we will investigate various recourses to sound throughout the African American literary tradition. We will read the work of literary figures like Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston and Ann Petry alongside critics like Amiri Baraka, Daphne Brooks, Fred Moten, and Alexander Weheliye. Traversing the sonic color line, we will develop new understandings of black aesthetics, literature, and politics.

Prerequisite: ENG 225, ENG 227, ENG 228, ENG 229, ENG 231, ENG 232, or ENG 273.
Note: Plus-2 option available.
Instructor: Moriah