African American Literature

1. African American writers have been among the staunchest supporters and the severest critics of Christianity. Choose four writers and explore their critique of Christianity: Are there substantive differences in either the rhetorical style and methods or the content of the critiques written by black writers?

2. The spiritual autobiography, the captivity narrative, and the slave narrative share common qualities, while diverging in important ways. Write an essay in which you explore their generic similarities and differences. You will need to discuss relevant examples from each genre to support your argument.

3. One of the commonplaces of recent feminist theory has been that men tend to value individualism while women tend to value community. Discuss the complexities of these associations, as well as the limitations of such binary thinking. You might consider such questions as: How well do African American writers fit this pattern? Are there texts in which both individualism and community are valued? Do the associations vary according to time period (i.e., how do earlier texts compare with later ones)? In your discussion, while you should focus on three or four texts from your list, you may bring in additional examples to support your perspective.

4. Slotkin and others have claimed that the captivity narrative is the founding genre of American literature, while Gates and others have claimed that the slave narrative has the same foundational status for African-American literature. Using two or three texts from the captivity tradition and two or three from the slave narrative tradition, 1) examine the validity of the theoretical concept of a "founding genre" particularly as applied to literature written in North America, and 2) discuss the protagonists' or narrators' developing understandings of their identities as well as their alter readers' identities in order to determine if these rhetorical expressions of ethos bear out a distinction between American and African-American traditions. Do these traditions oppose one another, overlap, or influence one another? What is the best way to describe the relationship between these two traditions?

5. Extremely violent European explorers and their Euro-American slaveholding descendants established a country obsessed by the belief that persons of color could not equal white-skinned people. How do writers portray such a heritage of racial preference and privilege in its 20th-century beneficiaries? Will these characters prevail amidst the overwhelming majority of colored peoples in a 21st-century dominated by a global economy?

6. In Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, Houston Baker argues that black writers mastered white literary forms, and then (in many cases) “deformed” them as an act of political protest. Whatever the individual merits of Baker’s argument, it seems clear that literary form often obtains political resonance. Select three African American writers and analyze how the form of their work intersects with its political content (broadly conceived).

7. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man can be read as a search for identity. But at the end of this search, the symbolically unnamed narrator discovers that the notion of "finding" an identity in America is absurd. At the same time, this quest for identity in Ellison's novel launches many connections with Emerson's work. The narrator's search ties, if critically, into Emersonian individualism and its complex ideology. Address the dialogue with this ideology in Invisible Man and other works by some the following authors: W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and Toni Morrison. Pay attention to the cultural-historical context shaped by race, ethnicity, and gender, as well as to style, and to continuities no less than to changes. Make sure you include poetry in your discussion.

8. How does gender affect the representation of racism in works by Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker? You might think about these authors’ work in relation to work by African-American men like Wright, Ellison, and Reed.

9.  Audre Lorde writes that the erotic is “a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpected or unrecognized feeling.”  Discuss the complexities of sexuality in three African American women’s texts.  In your discussion, you might consider such questions as:  Is sexuality seen as uniformly affirming?  Why or why not?  In what circumstances is sexuality used for self-empowerment?  What challenges face African American women writers in representing sexuality? 

10.  Design an undergraduate survey course in African American literature that encompasses the range of this literature in terms of period, genre, place, and gender AND that brings to bear your own cultural/educational background.  Outline the course objectives, provide a list of essential readings, and explain how those readings advance the course objectives.

11.   In the introduction to her narrative, Harriet Jacobs writes, “Reader, be assured, this narrative is no fiction,” and African American writing is often profoundly shaped by both a consciousness of audience and a commitment to tell the truth.  Focusing on the work of three African American writers from different time periods, discuss how audience helps shape writers’ work, particularly in relation to their ability to “tell the truth.”  How do stories differ according to different audiences?  How do the ways in which they are told (in particular, their form and style) compare for different audiences?

12.  The theme of healing is well-represented in African American literature.  Discuss the handling of this theme in three authors from different periods. Be sure not to limit your answer to the novel only.

13. How is WEB Dubois a pragmatist?  How do his pragmatic ideas find a place in your own pedagogy?  Use any pedagogical theorists (from your other lists as well as this one!) to help you frame your response. 

14. Black nationalism is a major motif in the African American literary tradition, formed out of the need of displaced and culturally diverse Africans to redefine themselves as a people in an alien land.  Indeed, in “An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America,” Reverend Henry Highland Garnet virtually screams:  “TO SUCH DEGRADATION [slavery] IT IS SINFUL IN THE EXTREME FOR YOU TO MAKE VOLUNTARY SUBMISSION.”  Using no fewer than four texts, define black nationalism in works that pre- and post-date Garnet’s sermonizing, critically evaluating its roots, forms, techniques, etc.  How and why do writings as seemingly unlike as Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery and Malcom X’s Autobiography nonetheless echo each other’s multi-faceted nationalist concerns?

15.  Select no fewer than four texts that comparatively address how African American writers soon came to understand that the religion of the United States (primarily Christianity) posed a contrast between myth and reality, being often a commodity to be packaged and sold to the believer’s advantage or disadvantage.  Discuss extensively how no less than four authors reconcile the stensible salvation American religion provides with its ability to control, oppress, and redefine those things and people it touches. Does time alter these religious portrayals? 

16. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and other African American theorists and critics have noted, African American literary signifying evolved from an African past into an African-American folk tradition that effectively enabled enslaved Africans to cope with their new environment.  First, define African American signifying by charting its formative Africa-to-America process.  Then, explain how this process ironically helps to lay the foundation and eventually prepare the Africans to combat the greater signifying of the United States culture. Use no less than four African American texts to make your point.

17. How would you teach the development of the African American slave narrative and its progression to the neo-slave narrative to undergraduate students totally unfamiliar with this peculiar American genre?  Which works would you include or exclude from your syllabus, as you unpack the complex American slavocracy their authors document? How would you organize this course? What exactly do you want your students to learn? Why?  In other words, write a detailed course description for the classroom that tracks the slave narrative/neo-slave narrative evolution.

18. Select no fewer than four African American poets and discuss the often critically neglected African  American poetic tradition. How would you best characterize it and why?  Did (or did not) the Harlem Renaissance shape, mold, and advance it? The Black Arts Movement? How and Why (not)?  How does it relate to America’s larger multi-cultural/ethnic poetic heritage?

19. Discuss the historical and cultural roots of African American literary “passing,” tracking its development from characters simply “passing for white” to its various other forms.  Using no fewer than four African American authors, identify its relationship to such social fictions as “miscegenation,” “mulattoes,“ and “one-drop rule.”  Is such language still relevant in the Age of Barack Obama?    

20. Discuss the relationship between gender and voice in the African American literary project. Does gender shape the way a story gets told (here you might pay attention to the presence of the sentimental, the use of motherhood, and the focus on family relationships, whether metaphoric or real)?  Are certain moral values, ways of speaking, ways of reading or listening assigned to a particular gender in African American literature?  Do authors attempt to speak to prior literary texts and reference historic misrepresentations of gender? What does a focus on gender in African American literature seem to accomplish in the context of a national literature?

21. Discuss the issue of literary voice in African American literature in relationship to the authentic and factual.  In what ways do the Narratives written by escaped or manumitted slaves such as Equiano, Douglass, or Jacobs contribute to their freedom or captivity? How do they use authenticating devices in their texts? Be very specific about how the authors present the enabling and constraining aspects of literature and/or literacy, fact and fiction, in their works. Or, for example, does fiction open up a broader realm of what can be represented and which voices can be used in African American literature?  Use two slave narratives and one fictional narrative (possibly a “neo- slave narrative”) to discuss the ways in which the authentic and factual are devices that enable freedom and/or create captivity.

22. In Giuliana Fabi’s work on passing, she argues that nineteenth-century representations of mulatto characters in works by African American authors as various as William Wells Brown, Charles Chesnutt, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper are “subversive representations.” Discuss three literary texts in order to support, refute, and/ or complicate Fabi’s claim. You need not discuss passing; be sure to focus on the representation of the “mulatto.”

23. Writing of female slaves, Claudia Tate has contended, “motherhood was an institution to which they had only biological claim.” Compare and contrast the representations of motherhood in three writers.  How do the mother’s identity and her personal circumstances determine the shape of her mothering?  What does it mean to be a “good mother” for different women?  How does the concept of motherhood, or the “good mother” change over time or place?  How do writers use style or form to address the question of motherhood?

24. In her famous essay, Audre Lorde claims that “Poetry is Not a Luxury.”  Although many of the most familiar writers today are novelists, African American writing began with poetry and nonfiction, the latter often in the form of the essay or autobiography. Focusing on one poet, one nonfiction writer, and one fiction writer, discuss how genre impacts what a writer is able to say.  Are there messages more amenable to poetry (for example) than to nonfiction? What forms help authorize African American writers as they address specific audiences?  How does the time period in which each writer publishes influence her or his choice of genre?