ENGL 20819 - "Black Arts": Figuring the African Diaspora

Institution:

University of Notre Dame

Subject:

English

Description:

This course offers a survey of black diasporic artistry. At the same time, it is an ongoing analysis of how these artists asked, "what constitutes the African diaspora" in divergent and convergent ways. The main goal of the course is not simply to label certain artists as part of this diasporic formation, but to understand how artists reflected upon their participation in it (and, in some ways, outside of it). We will focus primarily on this conversation's development from the Interwar period of the twentieth-century to the turn of the twenty-first century through poetry, prose fiction and nonfiction, film, television, and dance. From the United States, we will look at how creative intellectuals like the poet Langston Hughes, dancer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham, novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, fiction writer and essayist Richard Wright, and journalist Alex Haley used art to understand their relationship to black peoples in the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa, along with key events impacting those different geographies. But the course will also consider how black creative intellectuals outside the United States reflected on their relationship to the diaspora. These will include Algerian philosopher Frantz Fanon, Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén, Nigerian musician Fela Kuti, and Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Derek Walcott. In exploring different conceptions of diaspora, we will encounter other themes including the idea of overlapping diasporas, black nationalism, the body, and the significance of translation to cultural solidarity and difference.

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.nd.edu

Phone Number:

(574) 631-5000

Regional Accreditation:

North Central Association of Colleges and Schools

Calendar System:

Semester

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