ENGL 347A:
The Fire This Time: Contemporary Black Non-Fiction
When many of our cultural, political and economic crises center on or attempt to evade issues of race, black writers have been central to articulating the zeitgeist. And in such times many of them favor non-fiction as a method of either directly approaching “truth” or of dissecting it in order to explore exactly how it functions, for whom and to what ends. This class focuses on a series of important works of non-fiction by black writers who engage our contemporary “crises” from multiple perspectives. Ranging from memoir to reportage, criticism to political punditry, these works not only demonstrate the range of possibilities available in non-fiction but also provide an ongoing narrative of our changing racial realities and our rapidly transforming notions of “the real.”