Writing Black Women into History: Ten Characters from American Literature

This course invites students to engage with the rich and enduring literary canon of Black women writers from the nineteenth century to the present. We will explore Black women's expressive traditions across fiction, poetry, music, and drama, and trace how Black women's literary voices have served as powerful sites of creativity, resistance, and self-definition. Readings will range from classic texts such as Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) to the contemporary works of Alice Walker, Nina Simone, and Tayari Jones. Drawing on spirituals, blues, and jazz, the course examines the interplay between sound and text as a critical framework for understanding Black women's literary production. The course also explores drama and theater through the work of playwrights including Lorraine Hansberry, Ntozake Shange, and Lynn Nottage. As we engage each work, we will situate it within its historical moment, paying close attention to the political, social, and personal conditions under which Black women wrote. Each week, literary texts will be read alongside historical scholarship, allowing us to consider literature as both an artistic form and a historical intervention. Throughout the course, we will pay particular attention to the ways Black women have used their voices to demand social, political, economic, and personal freedom; to confront sexual assault, domestic violence, economic inequality, and mass incarceration; and to deploy artistic expression as a means of healing from trauma and imagining worlds not yet realized.