AFRC770 - New Directions in Black Thought and Literature

How does Elizabeth Alexanders poem Praise Song for the Day, written for the inauguration of Barack Obama, relate to Amiri Barakas 9/11 poem Somebody Blew America? This seminar will explore the unnaming and experimentation that shape African American literature and theory in the early years of the 21st century. frameworks of the seminar will include the post-9/11 novel, the poetics of the black, black abstraction, twenty-first century practices of the black diaspora Age of Obama turn to the satirical. Critical texts such as How to See a Work Total Darkness and Abstractionist Aesthetics will be as central as cutting edgesuch as The Psychic Hold of Slavery and signature essays such as On Failing to the Past Present. This course will focus on the new literary voices that have the 21st century and, also, writers whose 21st century art is the late stage ofliterary trajectory. Special attention will be given to Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead,Octavia Butler, Claudia Rankine, Mat Johnson, and Paul Beatty.