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AFRICAN AND AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDIES (L90)  (Dept. Info)Arts & Sciences  (Policies)SP2021
L90 AFAS 5231Seminar: James Baldwin Now3.0 Units
Description:This seminar will examine why James Baldwin, buried in 1987, now often seems the most cherished and influential African American writer of the 21st century. An inexhaustible public witness and the author of poems, plays, essays, memoirs, novels, short stories, and film scripts, Baldwin, born amid the Harlem Renaissance in 1924, stamped and defied African American literary movements from the high Black modernism of the 1950s to the post-Black Arts neo-realism of the 1980s. His first novel, the autobiographical "Go Tell It on the Mountain" (1953), wrestled with the mixed heritage of rural Black Christianity, the urbanizing Great Migration, and Great Depression-style social protest fiction. His second novel, "Giovanni's Room" (1956), set in Paris and peopled with non-Black characters, explored the intersection of same-sex desire and American national identity years before Stonewall announced the U.S. gay rights movement. "Notes of a Native Son" (1955), the first collection of his lush and cutting essays, is perhaps the most-tweeted book of our time and is listed among the Modern Library's top twenty nonfiction titles of the 20th century. Our reading list will contain all of these Baldwin books, and more, but we'll end with a sequence of texts revealing various facets of Baldwin's resurrected meaning in the era of Black Lives Matter: Ta-Nehisi Coates's memoir "Between the World and Me" (2015) and Jesmyn Ward's collection "The Fire This Time" (2016), both conversations with Baldwin's Civil Rights classic "The Fire Next Time" (1963); Raoul Peck's documentary "I Am Not Your Negro" (2017) and Barry's Jenkins' 2018 feature film of Baldwin's 1974 novel "If Beale Street Could Talk," each drawing from Baldwin's second career as a TV-ready professor-prophet; and, finally, Eddie Glaude Jr.'s "Begin Again" (2020), a study of Baldwin's post-Civil Rights disillusionment that conducts a running argument with post-Obama Afropessimism. Altogether, then, this will be a single-author seminar on a singular author whose life after death illuminates several general issues: the dynamics of literary revivals in a socially mediated age; the literary pre-history and cultural origins of Black Lives Matter; the uses and limits of inherited periodizations of 20th-century African American writing; and the significance of redemptive queer historicisms and the expanding Black archive at a moment when a firm break with the progressive tradition in Black historiography has never looked more possible.
Attributes:
Instruction Type:Remote per COVID-19 Grade Options:CPA Fees:
Course Type:IdentSame As:L14 5231Frequency:None / History
SecDays       TimeBuilding / RoomInstructorFinal ExamSeatsEnrollWaits
01-T-----4:00P-6:20PRemote / LA MaxwellNo Final1540
Desc:Fully remote. Synchronous each meeting.
REG-DelayStart: 1/25/2021   End: 5/13/2021
Actions:Books
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