Queer, Gender-Bending, and Subversive: Or, What Else Was the Harlem Renaissance?
AFAM 224
Spring 2027
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01
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In this course, we will revise our understanding of one of the most important periods in African American life: the Harlem Renaissance. It was not only as a period of unprecedented Black cultural production and institution building; it was also a period of blossoming queer social practices and aesthetic expression. We have been taught that ideologies of ¿racial uplift¿ and ¿respectability¿ underpinned this boom in Black visual art, literature, dance, and music from the late 1910s to the 1930s. This class will trace the lesser-known story of how, at the same time, Black artists articulated a politics of liberation by representing queer intimacies and gender-bending performances. We will trace this story through the works of writers. Rather than simply refuting stereotypes of African American life and arguing for higher positions in rigid hierarchies of sexual and racial difference, these writers constructed new queer identities, temporalities, socialities, and geographies. By attending closely to the work of Harlem Renaissance poets, fiction writers, and dramatists, we will examine how our conception of the Harlem Renaissance as a time of tradition-defining debates over aesthetic representation and the purpose of art is necessarily incomplete without the new social formations and new forms of greater freedom within queer, gender-bending, and subversive literature. |
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
None |
| Course Format: Lecture / Discussion | Grading Mode: Graded |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Requirement for: (African American Studies Minor)(African American Studies) |
| SECTION 01 |
Major Readings: Wesleyan RJ Julia Bookstore
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Course reader with selections by Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Nella Larsen, Angelina Grimké, and Georgia Douglas Johnson.
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Examinations and Assignments:
blog posts; critical analysis paper; archival object analysis; final project |
Additional Requirements and/or Comments:
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| Instructor(s): Modi,Jessica Marion Times: .M.W... 02:50PM-04:10PM; Location: TBA |
| Total Enrollment Limit: 19 | | SR major: 4 | JR major: 4 | | |
| | GRAD: X | SR non-major: 2 | JR non-major: 3 | SO: 3 | FR: 3 |
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