AFRC527 - Market Women & Madames: Gender,Sexuality & Race in the Caribbean & LAmerica

Storytelling, oral history, and memoir are some of the oldest formsof documenting lives. Pivoting around the themes of voice, authenticity and memory, this course considers the methods, theories and archival practices of autobiography, biography and oral history. It builds on the last two decades of scholarship that pair oral history with traditional written archival material-giving particular attention to the methodologies and practices used by African descended women and queer storytellers and listeners. During our discussions, we will consider the ethics between researcher and storyteller while addressing the following questions: How do emotions, performance, and identities (gender, sexuality, race, age, (dis)ability, etc.) inform the stories we tell and collect? How does oral history impact the contemporary construction and narration of history? How does the practice and production of black women's and queer autobiography, biography and oral history inform interdisciplinary research methods and blur narrative genres?