Courses Designed to Meet General Education Requirements

Humanities

English 360
The Problem of Race in American Literature
Judith Lockyer
Albion College

This upper division English seminar examines the problem of black/white racial conflict in the United States as it is addressed in literature from the antebellum period to mid-twentieth century.

The aim of this seminar is to examine, in their cultural and historical contexts, a group of important works of American literature whose primary concern is the problem of black/white racial conflict. We will read texts that take up the problems of slavery and of race, examine their representations of blackness and whiteness, and situate them within the historical moments that have defined surges in writing about race up through the modern era: the coming of the Civil War; the failure of the Reconstruction; and the establishment of the color line in the doctrine of separate but equal and its role in black/white relations into the mid-twentieth century.

PRIMARY TEXTS

Turner/Gray, "The Confessions of Nat Turner" (course pack)
Melville, "Benito Cereno" (course pack)
Douglass, "The Heroic Slave" (course pack)
Twain, Puddin'head Wilson
DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (course pack)
Hopkins, Contending Forces
Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition
Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
Larsen, Quicksand and Passing
O'Neill, Emperor Jones
Faulkner, Light in August
Glasgow, Virginia
Baldwin, Blues for Mister Charlie
and chapters 4 and 10 from Long Memory: The Black Experience in America, Berry & Blassingame (course pack)

Background reading:
Said, "The Ideology of Difference"
Appiah, "The Uncompleted Argument: DuBois and the Illusion of
Race"Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood
Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877
Sundquist, "Benito Cereno and New World Slavery"
Hooks, "Sexism and the Black Female Slave Experience"
Cooper, A Voice From the South
Wells, On Lynchings
American Constitutional Law: "Plessy v. Ferguson," "Dred Scott v. Sandford," "Civil Rights Act of 1883."
Fox-Genovese, Within the Planation Household
Gates, Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and `Racial' Self
Woodward, Origins of the New South and The Strange Career of Jim Crow

Lockyer/Eng 360 1. Each of you will be responsible for introducing a text or an issue during the semester. Your presentation should be 10-15 minutes long and be concerned primarily with raising issues or problems in the text you choose (from either the primary or background texts). You should end with 1-2 questions for the class to deal with. You will turn in a written summary of your findings with the question that you pose to the class to initiate discussion. 2. You will write three papers on various questions that come out of the reading. One will require a close reading of 20-25 lines of texts; one will be a comparison/contrast paper; and the final paper will ask you to incorporate secondary sources in the exploration of a particular question. 3. Your attendance and participation count. All papers must be typed. Late papers will be docked. 4. The final exam in this course is ____________________________.

1. WEEK of Aug. 28 and 30:
Introductory lecture on "race" and its historical designations. We will read "The Confessions of Nat Turner" and examine the intersection of slavery and revolution in the antebellum literary mind and begin to look at how race and racial conflict is represented.

2. SEPT. 4: LABOR DAY
SEPT. 6:
We will continue the discussion and add to it Melville's Benito Cereno to explore Melville's questions of American innocence and guilt as they appear in his account of an actual slave rebellion.
From Melville we will move to Frederick Douglass' only work of fiction, "The Heroic Slave." Based on the revolt lead by Madison Washington aboard the slave ship Creole, HS capitalizes upon some of Melville's strategies for the representation of slave revolt and provides opening evidence for a semester-long discussion of the rhetorical strategies black authors employ to reach white audiences.

3. WEEK of SEPT. 11 and 13:
Mark Twain, Puddin'head Wilson: As Reconstruction failed and legal lines of separation reappeared, culminating in the doctrine of "separate but equal" announced in Plessy v. Ferguson, the color line invaded all realities of race relations and all forms of writing about it. We will look at the way in which the paradox of the Plessy case (re. a black man who could pass for white but who was nevertheless subject to Jim Crow) defines the tragic farce of Twain's novel. We will pay particular attention to the yoking of antebellum law and racial attitudes to the scientific racism of the 1890s.

4. WEEK of SEPT. 18 and 21:
We will continue our discussion of the color line and inject questions of gender, particularly as they come up in Twain's representation of the mulatto, Roxanne. That will set up the beginning discussions of Nella Larsen's novels, Quicksand and Passing. We will also discuss chapter 4, "Sex and Racism," to begin discussion of the gender issues.

5. WEEK of SEPT. 25 and 27:
PAPER DUE SEPT 25
After we finish Larsen's novels, we will read excerpts from W.E.B. DuBois' defining work, The Souls of Black Folk. He takes up the general issue of racial character and articulates an African American cultural consciousness that is rooted in slave culture and early black nationalism. That consciousness reaches coherence in the late 19th century responses to American segregation and European colonialism. DuBois' assertion that "the problem of the 20th century will be the problem of the color line" will echo throughout the seminar. We'll do some preliminary work with The Marrow of Tradition.

6. WEEK of OCT. 2 and 4:
Charles Chesnutt's 1901 novel, The Marrow of Tradition, explores the basic interdependence of racial mythology and black and white people's actions and attitudes. Like Twain, Chesnutt elaborates a series of doubled characters--doubled across both racial and class lines--in order to explore the increasing rigidity of the color line. His story of the Wilmington riot echoes the anti-lynching editorials of Ida B. Wells, as well as her ideas about interracial sexuality.

7. WEEK of OCT. 9 and 11:
We will discuss chapter 10, "White Proscriptions and Black Protests," to give wider context to Chesnutt's and Twain's concerns. If time permits, we will look at Chesnutt's short stories, "The Goophered Grapevine" and "The Wife of His Youth," to discuss Chesnutt's borrowing from oral tradition and his use of masking and other narrative strategies.

8. OCTOBER 16: FALL BREAK
OCTOBER 18:
In September 1900, Pauline Hopkins submitted a prospectus of her first novel to Colored American Magazine. In it, she posed a rhetorical question--"Of what use is fiction to the colored race at the present crisis in its history?"--that she would then take all four of her novels to answer. Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South argues that black women are as politically capable as men are of "raising the stigma of degradation" from black people. We will look at the novel's extraordinary revision of race relations during slavery as it challenges contemporary racist ideologies.

9. WEEK of OCT 23 and 25:
Finish discussion of Contending Forces. We will also read and discuss O'Neill's The Emperor Jones and view the 1933 film version (Paul Robeson in the title role) to see how the issues of representation become more complicated.

10. WEEK of OCT 30 and NOV 1:
Begin The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1929). Both the aesthetic tradition of masking and the rise of race theory in the late 19th century help to define central issues of the New Negro movement, which originated around the turn of the century. The novel's "white" protagonist figures the dilemma of passing now codified into the constitutional irony of Plessy; at the same time, the novel offers an ambiguous rescue of black culture.

11. WEEK of NOV 6 and 8:
We will discuss Faulkner's Light in August it represents the trauma of the color line from this white writer's perspective. Faulkner's characters are haunted by their own pasts as well as legacies they have inherited or assumed. His novel can be seen as one response to James Baldwin's cry, "White man, hear me!"

12. WEEK of NOV 13 and 15:
The issues of sexuality and race that Faulkner takes on are cast in far different lights in Glasgow's Virginia, which is a defense of white womanhood among other things.

13. NOV 20: We will finish Faulkner and Glasgow
NOV 22: THANKSGIVING BREAK. PAPER DUE EITHER NOV 20 or NOV 27

14. WEEK of NOV 27 and 29:
We will begin discussion of James Baldwin's Blues for Mister Charlie by referring again to Ida B. Wells' On Lynching and the story of Emmett Till.

15. WEEK of DEC 4 and 6:
Reserved for discussions about all the texts. Rather than finalize answers to the questions they raise, we will articulate as a class the questions and issues that persist for us in the closing decade of the century DuBois predicted would be haunted by the problem of the color line.

16. WEEK of DEC 11 and 13:
FINAL PAPER DUE DEC 13.
Reserved for catch-up and work on final papers. Class will be held in any event.