ENGL6025 · English

Seminar: Race, Place, and Black Atlanta

Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences

From Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois to OutKast and Donald Glover's hit series, Atlanta is an enduring geographic/political site of black cultural imagining. Nevertheless the city often receives second or third billing in courses examining black literary and cultural production. While acknowledging the networks between Atlanta and more frequently highlighted places like New York and Paris, this course posits Atlanta as a rich geographic, cultural, and political site from which we can trace, if not also reimagine, a history of reading the complex relationship between race and blackness in the U.S. Paying particular attention to issues of gender, body, and mobility, the course will foreground a diversity of texts across mediums, genre, and time. This class is designed as a hybrid graduate/undergraduate course. To that end it will include different tracks for the final project. Students taking the course at the graduate level will be responsible for composing at least one position paper based on a critical secondary text and facilitating a class discussion around that paper. Fulfills BOTH the Seminar and the Race, Blackness, and Language requirements for English majors.