ENGL1586 — Race and 21st-Century Lit
In this course, students grapple with significant works of twenty-first-century literature, film and other cultural media in which race is a central concern. How have some of the major writers, artists, and other culture producers of our students lifetimes engaged with the concept of race and the sources and effects of racism, from the experience of microaggression to the significance of structural racism on scales local, national, and global? How do literature and culture generate particular kinds of knowledge and feelings about race and structural racism? To what extent do they (or might they) affect social change? This course intentionally situates American literature and culture alongside texts from other national traditions to help elucidate both the specificity of racial politics in the United States and its interrelation with global histories of imperialism and postcolonialism.