Featuring film, visual art, and popular fiction, this course explores histories and legacies of slavery in the United States. In addition to looking at how our range of creative forms narrate US slavery, we will consider how creative depictions of the institution allow us to think differentlyand more criticallyabout the racial and gendered identities defined and refined in US slavery as well as intra-/inter-racial relationships that derive from them. In Narratives of Slavery, students will examine how whiteness and white privilege were defined, then organized to empower and serve the master class; how whiteness as a racial/class category made blackness, and how the resulting power/privilege dynamic is visible in our primary texts, and reflected in our current social and political contexts. By the end of the semester, students will hone the following skills: read and interpret different types of creative narratives, debate and test ideas in class discussion and in written essays, make use of secondary sources to interpret primary narratives, and identify how legacies of slavery manifest in 21st century US. Assignments include short response papers, one longer essay (developed from a response paper), and a take-home midterm exam.
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