Topics in English and American Literature: Black Riders: 19th-Century African American Print Culture

In the nineteenth century, African Americans turned to print to argue for emancipation, assert their rights, and narrate their experiences in their own words. Between influential works such as Frederick Douglass's newspapers and slave narratives, the printed speeches of Black women including Maria Stewart and Sojourner Truth, and the famous novel by white abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, it's fair to say that the Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction would not have happened without the technology of print. In this course, students will encounter how print media has shaped Black and U.S. literature and politics. We will explore the numerous technologies that Black and abolitionist writers utilized, pioneered, and remixed during the nineteenth-century golden age of mass print. In addition to reading African American literature in its original historical and printed contexts, we will trace the afterlives of these texts, encountering strategies of repression, recovery, and archiving that are integral to Black literary history. This course equips students to read critically beyond the page, focusing not just on traditional literary texts but also advertisements in newspapers and magazines, publishers' information, and matters of typography and layout that are just as political as they are aesthetic. This course satisfies the global or minority literatures requirement for students who declare an English major in the fall 2021 semester and beyond. Satisfies the Nineteenth Century requirement. This course counts as an elective to the Publishing Concentration.
Course Attributes: EN H; BU Hum; AS HUM; FA HUM; AR HUM

Topics in English and American Literature: Black Riders: 19th-Century African American Print Culture

AMERICAN CULTURE STUDIES 3131

Section 01