CSP 59 The Latin American Jungle in Western Imagination

This course centers on four notable black feminist texts of the 20th and 21st centuries — Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973), Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991), Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and Beyonce’s Lemonade (2016) — to examine/think through how black feminist aesthetics, politics, and criticism inform each other.  These four texts — two novels, a film, and a visual album produced in four different decades — offer students a rich tapestry of black women’s expression and experience that responds to and reflects upon the shifting socio-political conditions that have shaped gender, sexuality, and experiences of antiblackness within black communities.  Students will read critical essays alongside each text that helps them unpack the meanings and situates the text within broader black feminist conversations. As such, students will be introduced to some of the key interventions that black feminists have made in the 20th/21st centuries, including the critical frameworks of intersectionality, the sexual, gendered, and racial afterlife of chattel slavery, black feminist genealogy, the interlocking nature of structures of power, and how blackness is particularly gendered.  As a writing intensive course, students will write critical analytic essays that explore the salient themes introduced in these black feminist texts.