WGSS 304 - Gender, Genre, and Sexuality in Afrodiasporic Literature

Institution:

Williams College

Subject:

Women's, Gender & Sexuality

Description:

In her essay "Peter's Pans: Eating in the Diaspora," literary critic Hortense Spillers argues that "[b]lack writers, whatever their location and by whatever projects and allegiances they are compelled, must retool the language(s) that they inherit" in order to express their experience of blackness. This course considers how this "retool[ing]" of language occurs in African Diasporic literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, and how new "language(s)" of literary form and genre impact black writers' representations of gender and sexuality. We will focus on writers and filmmakers such as Bessie Head, Zora Neale Hurston, Mariama Ba, W.E.B. Du Bois, Cheryl Dunye, Gwendolyn Brooks, Isaac Julien, Michelle Cliff, Sapphire, Lewis Nkosi, Junot Diaz, and others whose works destabilize conventions of genre, blurring the lines between fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction. We will examine these texts alongside theories of genre, gender and sexuality offered by Spillers, Michelle Wright, Cheryl Clarke, Judith Butler, Evie Shockley, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and others. Through these texts, we will consider how Afrodiasporic writers address questions of gender and sexual identity that arise at various moments in modern African diaspora history, and how "retool[ed]" languages of literature complicate global ideas about black gender and sexuality. This course meets the requirements of the Exploring Diversity Initiative in that it increases students' knowledge of the experiences of people disempowered on the bases of race, gender, and sexuality in a multinational context, and allows them to understand creative expression as a means of interrogating disempowering social structures and ideologies.

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Some coursework in WGSS, AFR, ENGL or COMP

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Seminar

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.williams.edu

Phone Number:

(413) 597-3131

Regional Accreditation:

New England Association of Schools and Colleges

Calendar System:

Four-one-four plan

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