Fall 2021 Course Details: Come laugh at racism with us! “And there’s something funny—there’s always something a little funny in all our disasters, if one can face the disaster,” said James Baldwin in his “The Uses of the Blues.” This semester, we will apply several different critical approaches to explore and understand what race is. Of our special concern will be the claim that race is a culturally (not biologically) constructed category. The reading list will include literary texts (Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif”), works of African American comedians (Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, etc.), philosophical texts (Immanuel Kant, W. E. B. Du Bois, K. A. Appiah, etc.) as well as some legal documents (recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions concerning affirmative action) and Henry Louis Gates’s recent, Stony the Road. The general goal of the course is to improve the student’s ability to speak and think critically about race and race relations in the U.S. 

In Fall 2021 this course fulfills a Post-1800 Literature requirement for English majors.

In Fall 2021 this course fulfills the Race & Diversity requirement for English majors.