ENGL 390 - 01W

Regular Academic Session

3316

Undergraduate

3 units

Graded Alpha

.

Prerequisite: Junior standing.

This course is required of all English majors. It offers an advanced, intensive study of a period, author, genre, theme or critical issue in a seminar setting. Topics are announced when the course is offered.

Outcomes: Students will be able to recognize the ways that the subject matter of the seminar relates to the production, representation, and interpretation of artistic culture.

Department Consent Required

Pre-requisites: UCWR 110, C- or higher Pre-requisites: UCWR 110 and one 200-level English course.

Writing Intensive and Multicultural

This is a multicultural class. This is a writing intensive class. A grade of C- or better in UCWR 110 is required to enroll. Liberalism in the Black Imagination How do we make sense of the simultaneous expansion and exacerbation of US chattel slavery alongside (or within) the formation of a liberal democracy in the US following the American Revolution? Liberalism and its key tenets of human freedom, equality, dignity, individual sovereignty, and opposition to tyranny seem at odds with enslavement; however, early Black writers wrestled with and comprehended how these contradictions were resolved. In this Advanced Seminar, we will engage a body of work that juxtaposes the human and the inhuman, the normal and the aberrant in order to wrestle with how early African-descendent authors articulated the precarity of Blackness within liberalism and, more broadly, Western modernity. We will read key works of critical theory alongside important specimens of Black counter-discourse, such as Jeffrey Brace¿s The Blind African Slave (1810); Harriet Wilson¿s Our Nig (1859); Pauline E. Hopkins¿s Of One Blood (1902-3); and George S. Schuyler¿s Black No More (1931). In so doing, we will interrogate how the authors represented and subsequently theorized the coexistence of racial subjugation (i.e., commodification, objectification, enslavement, and second-class citizenship) beside Enlightenment-cum-American ideals of liberalism, progress, democracy, freedom, and nationalism, which are ideals believed to transcend the very practices of race and racialization. Early Black authors have something critically important to say about this seeming paradox. We will ask how these works depicted slavery, anti-Black racism, and white supremacy as phenomena not distinct from modernity (i.e., something ¿backwards¿) but rather central to the creation and function of progress.

Frederick Staidum

TuTh 10:00AM - 11:15AM

01/13/2025 - 04/26/2025

In person

Lake Shore Campus

Lake Shore Campus

Open

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