African-American Literature: Early Writers to the Harlem Renaissance

This class/directed reading group will focus on approximately the first century of African American publications-of autobiographies and novels, manifestos and newspaper editorials. Although many works by early Black writers are now available in print-Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs spring instantly to mind-many more can be accessed through digital archives. We will survey a core group of printed texts, augmenting our readings via digital entities such as the Colored Conventions: Bringing Nineteenth-Century Black Organizing to Digital Life, Common-Place's Just Teach One: Early African American Print and the Digital Collections of the Schomburg Division of the New York Public Library. Assignments will include essays and/or digital/online projects. Some classes may meet in the library or the Digital Humanities Workshop. This course may fulfill the global or minority literatures requirement for students who declare an English major in the fall 2021 semester and beyond.
Course Attributes: BU Hum; AS HUM; AS SD I; EL GML; FA HUM; AR HUM; EN H

African-American Literature: Early Writers to the Harlem Renaissance

AMERICAN CULTURE STUDIES 3871

Section 01