The course takes place each Monday at 12:30 in the main building of the Faculty of Arts, room 034.

All materials + additional reading are available through the Moodle page of the course

WEEK 1 – Introduction (7.10.)

In-class reading: Terrence Hayes, “How to Draw a Perfect Circle,” How to Be Drawn (New York: Penguin Books, 2015), 98-100.

WEEK 2 - What is African American Literature? (14.10.)

Kenneth W. Warren, “On ‘What Was African American Literature’”, American Literary Studies: New Text, New Approaches, New Challenges, 2010, 739-742

“What Was African American Literature? - A Podcast with Kenneth W. Warren.” Harvard University Press Blog, 5 Jan. 2011, <https://harvardpress.typepad.com/hup_publicity/2011/01/what-was-african-american-literature-podcast-kenneth-warren.html.>

WEEK 3 – Young, Gifted, and Black: On Microaggressions and Serena Williams (21.10.)

Excerpts from Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyrics (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014).

WEEK 4 – Different Times, Different Bodies (4.11.)

Danez Smith, “not an elegy for Mike Brown,” Don’t Call Us Dead: Poems (Minneapolis, Graywolf Press, 2017), 81.

Margaret Walker “For Malcolm X,” This is My Century: New and Selected Poems (University of Georgia Press, 1989), 70.

Amiri Baraka/Leroi Jones: “A Poem for Black Hearts,” A Poem for Black Hearts (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1967), 4.

WEEK 5 – Poetry, Civil Rights, and the Cold War (11.11.)

In-class reading: various Civil Rights poems

Mary L. Dudziak: “Fighting the Cold War with Civil Rights Reform” Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001), 18-46

WEEK 6 - Erasures (18.11.)

Mary Helen Washington: “When Gwendolyn Brooks Wore Red,” The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s (Columbia University Press, 2014), 165-204

Gwendolyn Brooks, from A Street in Bronzeville (New York: Harper, 1945), Riot (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1969).

WEEK 7 – Essay Topics Presentation (25.11.)

WEEK 8 – Surveillance (2.12.)

William J. Maxwell, “The FBI is Perhaps the Most Dedicated and Influential Forgotten Critic of African American Literature,”(New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2015) 127-174.

Richard Wright, “The FB Eye Blues,” Richard Wright Reader (New York: Harper and Rown, 1978), 249-50.

WEEK 9 – Journeys (9.12.)

In-class reading: various poems of the Black diaspora

Paul Gilroy, “The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity,” The Black Atlantic (Harvard UP, 1993)1-40.

WEEK 10 - All That Rap: The Limits of the Literary (16.12.)

Guest seminar

WEEK 11 - Harlem and Prague (6.1.)

Charles Stabatos, “A Long Way from Prague: The Harlem Renaissance and Czechoslovakia,” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 50., Nr., Spring 2017, 39-74.

Langston Hughes, “Good Morning Revolution,” New Masses 8, 3 (September 1932), 5.