Spanning roughly The Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement this course will look at a range of Black writing from that time, and ask what it tells us about both the specificity of Black art and thought as well as politics in the United States. In a country constituted by the histories of slavery and segregation, work during this period reckoned with that history while imaging new forms of freedom. Alongside literature, the course will consider how literature was in dialogue with visual arts and music, the period’s political movements, and look at the relationship between race, gender, class, colonialism, and other questions of social difference.