This course focuses on African-American genre or “pulp” writing produced over the course of the 20th and 21st Centuries. Ranging from detective narratives to science fiction, fantasy, street literature and subgenres specific to black writing in America, this material is often marginalized or simply ignored by mainstream scholarship, history or criticism due to its refusal to conform to mainstream tastes, values or culture; and as such it becomes a perfect vantage point from which to make sense of what counts as “mainstream” or “literature” at any given time and place. We will discuss this often-controversial material not just as an alternate history of racial politics, but also as a heretical history of America itself and its popular literatures. Writers may include, Samuel R. Delany, George Schuyler, Pauline Hopkins, Zane, Rudolph Fisher, Octavia Butler, Chester Himes, Sam Greenlee, Iceberg Slim, N.K. Jemison, Tananarive Due, Donald Goines and LA Banks.