ENGL 541 A: Contemporary Literature

The study of black literature in the US has had a longstanding reliance on the methods and modes of inquiry that arise from the disciplinary location of history. As the incorporation of slave narratives into a black literary canon, and the significant impact of literary recovery projects on black literary canon formation more broadly illustrate, black literary studies has developed in the academy through shared concerns—over historical objects and their retrieval, standards of evidence, and terms of interpretation—with the developments of black history.
The interdisciplinary exchange between the studies of black literature and black history reaches a crucial flashpoint in the late 1980s. By making interventions within historiography, poststructuralism, and psychoanalysis, black literary scholars stridently raise the question of how literary methods can transform the study of history. They suggest that conventional historicist methods are insufficient for the study of black life, which always already bears a fraught relation to normative historical time.
This course will survey the various methodological approaches to black literary and cultural study over the last four decades of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first, which begins with the disciplinary exchange between the historical and the literary. By surveying various interventions in historiography and poststructuralism, along with theories of affect, the biopolitical, and performance, we will examine how questions about historical retrieval, historical consciousness, and temporality have shaped the methods and inquiries that have come to define black literary studies.