Who we are as African Americans, as Black folks in the diaspora, our cultural destiny, has been shaped by both the enslaved and the free. — bell hooks
ENG 2120
African American Literature
Spring 2025
Instructor: Dr. Alonzo Smith | Email: smithw2@appstate.edu |
| Office: Sanford Hall 448
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Course Description: Welcome! This course is an introduction to African American Literature and the major frameworks that shape this concept. We will be studying, interacting with, engaging, and yes, interrogating works that largely span the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries to harness the different experiences of African American thinkers and analyze how thought leaders constructed knowledge and created meaning. As well, the texts will cover multiple locations but will give particular attention to North America. With an emphasis on narratives of resistance, trauma, identity, and joy, we will explore multiple genres including slave narratives, fiction, film, documentary, and drama. Our probing of these texts will determine how authors and creatives were critiquing hegemonic misconceptions of African/Africana identity and creating spaces for themselves through their literary interventions. As such, among other texts, we will read and discourse with the printed texts of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. To map the continuities of the twentieth century, however, we will both read Nella Larsen’s Passing, and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and view adaptations of these storeyed works thereby increasing the cultural relevance of these authors.
ENG 2120 African American Literature: African Diaspora, with Dr. Alonzo Smith
ENG 2120 African American Literature: African Diaspora, with Dr. Alonzo Smith