AFAM 467 – African American Novel II

This course examines the African American novel, its forms, and its traditions starting during the Harlem Renaissance. It follows the genre's evolution into the twenty-first century, outlining the relationships among the texts that form the body of African American narrative as well as the relationships of those texts to the constantly shifting cultural and political realities surrounding their writing. From the Renaissance heralded by Alain Locke, through the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements -and their attendant Black Arts Movement- and into the era of the Movement for Black Lives, course readings encompass a broad range of styles and genres, from realism, naturalism, and naturalist primitivism, through the experimental forms, magical realism, and "postrace aesthetics" of later times.