Race, History, and the Fictive Imagination

Course Description

This course focuses on contemporary black writers’ fictional revisions, reconsiderations, and perhaps most importantly, re-imagings of History. By History, I mean the “official” (read racialized & patriarchal) versions of the past that often depend on omitting or obscuring the stories about people with discernible “differences” in race, gender, or sexuality. We consider what it means to do the work of reclaiming History in fiction. We read historical narratives to help contextualize the fictional works. The works we read tell a number of different stories/histories about black people’s pasts, including stories of the Middle Passage, Slavery, and Jim Crow in the American South.