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Studies in Victorian Literature (455-0-20)

Topic

Before Afterlives: 19th-C Lit and the Contours of

Instructors

Ivy G Wilson Jr

Meeting Info

University Hall 418: Mon 2:00PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

This course is conceptualized as a history of African American studies through, and against, the field of literary studies. Rather than take the literature as its central object, this course foregrounds the ways in some of the most important architects of African American Studies have engaged literature of the long nineteenth-century to re-animate critical theory. Works include Saidiya Hartman's Scenes of Subjection, Daphne Brooks's Bodies in Dissent, Ken Warren's Black and White Strangers, Antonio Benitez-Rojo's La Isla que se Repite, C.L.R. James's Black Jacobins, and Hazel Carby's Reconstructing Womanhood.