This class focuses on African American modernist literature and cultural productions by focusing on a radically underappreciated feature: labor. The class will analyze the centrality of labor and migration to the formation of African American modernism. Through it focus on labor and migration, this class seeks to explore a range literature and artistic productions during a period of profound social, political, and economic change. The course will be grounded in the labor and racial upheavals present at the turn of the century to World War II, in addition to focusing on the Great Migration that brought millions of primarily rural, Black agricultural workers to the north in search of jobs in industrial sectors. We will pay particular attention to the formation and political goals of the Harlem Renaissance by focusing on both its advocates, and the responses of a younger generation of artists who found the movement’s aesthetic program to be artistically stifling and opted to build an alternative aesthetic vision freed from the older generations more restrictive program. The class will engage novels, short stories, poetry, film, painting, photography, and more to understand how African American modernism engages both labor and migration. As such, the class will be theoretically grounded in literary studies and visual culture studies to equip students with a broad theoretical toolkit to work across a range of artistic mediums. The class will be of interest to students interested in literary studies, particularly the formation of literary movements, visual culture studies, which will pair nicely for those interested in visual rhetoric and cultural studies more broadly, and to those interested in grounding cultural productions in their unique historical specificity.
The goal of this class is to
- engage the history African American modernism.
- ground cultural productions (novels, films, paintings) in their appropriate social and historical context.
- provide students with a broad range of theoretical frameworks ranging from visual cultural studies, photo criticism, political theory, and literary studies.
Literature
McKay, Claude. Harlem Shadows,
McKay, Claude. Home to Harlem or Banjo
Dunbar, Paul. Sport of the Gods.
Larsen, Nella. Passing and Quicksand.
Fauset, Jessie. There is Confusion.
Johnson, James Weldon. Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.
Toomer, Jean. Cane.
Hughes, Langston. The Weary Blues & Not Without Laughter
Brown, Sterling. Southern Road
Locke, Alain. The New Negro
Thurman, Wallace. The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman
Secondary Material will be drawn from
Linfield, Susan. The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence
Sontag, Susan. On Photography.
Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories
Jones, Jacqeline. American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor
Smethurst, James. The African American Roots of Modernism
Lewis, David. When Harlem was in Vogue
Foley, Barbara. Spectres of 1919: Class & Nation in the Making of the New Negro
Foley, Barbara. Jean Toomer: Race, Repression, and Revolution
Cooper, Wayne. Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance
Painters
Aaron Douglass
Romare Bearden
Jacob Lawrence
Robert Pippen
Archibald Motely
Photographers and Film makers
James Van Der Zee
Oscar Micheaux
Newspapers and Magazines
The Messenger
The Crusader
The Crisis Magazine
Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life
The Chicago Defender