ENG 418—Studies in African American Literature and History

The content of this course is variable. For example: Prof. J. Holstun: Slave Rebellions Slave narratives usually means the stories of individual slaves or families as they suffer, survive, escape, and make reasoned and impassioned pleas for abolition. But enslaved black people throughout the Western hemisphere, and the white people who owned and feared them, also told themselves another sort of slave narrative stories of armed black people joining together to kill their white owners and liberate themselves. This course is about black revolutionary struggle, white fear, and some moments of solidarity. We will study stories of revolts by slaves in cities, on ships, and on plantations, primarily in the United States, but also in the Caribbean and Latin America. And we’ll consider both literary questions (about genre, style, and point of view) and political questions about terrorism, the right to revolt, and the ethics and efficacy of armed resistance.