ENGL3592W

From Harriet Jacobs’s depictions of her life in bondage in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to Audre Lorde’s moving essays on feminism and social (in)justice to Beyonce’s visual album Lemonade, black women’s writing has much to tell us about the meaning of survival and the myriad ways that race, class, gender, and other modalities of difference intersect in the national imaginary. In this course, we will use black women’s various forms of writing about themselves—from memoirs, autobiographies, and essays to blogs, song lyrics, and documentary films—as the source material for contemplating the sociocultural conditions of black female life in the past and present.

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