Fall 2016 Course: Literature of the Americas
Our investigations will bring us in contact with key narrative modes specific to the formation of American literature including: indigenous myths, stories of first contact, captivity narratives, witch trial testimonies, noble savage romances, slave narratives, anthropologies of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as Chicano/a and Native American resistance literatures. Theories of racial subjugation will form the framework for our deliberations including: Robert Berkhoffer’s The White Man’s Indian, Barbara Harlow’s Resistance Literature, Houston Baker’s Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Our goal will be to recognize the significant counter-histories that challenge the dominant narrative of American nation states as forming in a “waste and howling wilderness.”
