Critical Race & Ethnic Studies: Harlem Renaissance

Representative topic: African-American Women Writers in the Twentieth- and Twenty-first Centuries. May be repeated for credit with different content. Topics vary by offering; periodic offering at intervals that may exceed four years. Cross-listed with: ENGL 1220.

Open to degree and PACE students; Cross listed with ENGL 1220; Total combined enrollment = 50

Harlem Renaissance: The Harlem Renaissance Movement is undoubtedly the first most prominent and influential Black cultural movement of the modern era. Rising amidst the racial, and social tensions that plagued the United States at the end of the first World War( 1919), a group of old and young African American writers turned Harlem into what one of the group’s mentors, James Weldon Johnson, called “ the Negro capital of the world”. This cultural movement played a great role in the emergence of the African and West Indian Negritude Movement in Paris in the early 1930s. This course explores points of connection between these two most prominent 20th-century Black cultural movements and their relevance to contemporary pan-African literary production. Authors include Claude Mckay, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Alain Locke, Jean Toomer, Sterling Brown, Gwendolyn Bennett, Helene Johnson, Arna Bontemps, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, Léon Damas, and David Diop. This course satisfies D1 requirement.

My teaching style favors a combination of discussion, Socratic-style debate, and very careful analysis of assigned texts (which means that you must ALWAYS have the required reading material with you in class). I ask that you come to class with your mouth, ears, heart, and mind open; that you listen to and respect each other; and that you challenge yourself, your classmates, and me to do our very best.

Grading is based on class attendance and participation; formal essays; group presentation.