Elias Rodriques

This class combines Sarah Lawrence students and students from the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility; all class sessions and conference meetings will take place at Bedford. Consequently, all students must be at least 21 years of age.

From Frederick Douglass’ description of his time incarcerated, through Angela Davis’ representations of prisons in the 1970s, to Tayari Jones’ award-winning An American Marriage, the prison as an institution has long loomed large in the African American literary tradition. How, then, has incarceration shaped African American literature? And how has African American literature sought to represent the prison? This course seeks to answer these questions by proceeding chronologically, beginning with narratives of incarceration pre-Emancipation like those of Abraham Johnstone. We continue through accounts of convict leasing in the late 19th-century and mid-20th-century representations of incarceration by social realist authors like Richard Wright. We turn to Black feminist and Black arts representations of the prison by authors such as James Baldwin, Etheridge Knight, and more. And we end with the contemporary, considering how recent accounts of incarceration descend from a longer lineage of African American prison writing. Along the way, we will think closely about the relationship between legal citizenship, gender, race, sexuality, class and the prison. Additionally, throughout the course, short writing assignments aim to hone our skills as analysts.

When Black feminist writing boomed in the 1970s, the United States was squarely in the middle of the Cold War. Accordingly, Audre Lorde decried the United States invasion of Grenada, June Jordan railed against the Vietnam War, and Assata Shakur penned her autobiography in asylum in Cuba. Yet, Black feminism has primarily been considered a domestic affair. How might we better understand Black feminist literature by reading it in the context of the Cold War? This course aims to answer this question first by reading proto-Black feminist authors writing in the early Cold War and then returning to the famous authors of Black feminism to consider their portrait of international affairs. Authors may include Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, Pat Parker, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, and others. Along the way, we will read recent scholarship to understand the historical context in which those texts were written. In so doing, we aim to better understand the Cold War’s effect on Black feminism and what those canonical texts of Black feminism can tell us about American foreign policy. Short assignments may include brief historical essays, short close readings, and response papers.

From Olaudah Equiano’s 18th-century recounting of the Middle Passage through John Akomfrah’s 21st-century cinematic representations juxtaposing whaling with slavery, the Atlantic Ocean has loomed large in cultural production by Black artists, directors, and writers across the world. It is at once the site of the past trauma of the transatlantic slave trade and the ongoing trauma of rising tides, of the freedom offered Black mariners like Frederick Douglass and transatlantic intellectuals like Richard Wright and Stuart Hall, and more. This course will seek to unpack this tangled knot, to understand what role the ocean has played in Black thought and to consider what Black thought might offer to the ongoing climate crisis by engaging with representations of the Atlantic in visual art, literature, and film by Black cultural producers across the world. Beyond those named above, authors and artists may include Zora Neale Hurston, C. L. R. James, Mati Diop, M. Nourbese Philip, Abdulruzak Gurnah, and others. Additionally, this course will fully participate in the spring 2024 Sarah Lawrence Interdisciplinary Collaborative on the Environment (SLICE) Mellon course cluster, with a focus on environmental and climate justice and a strong involvement with local organizations. The semester will include two interludes during which students will engage in collaborative projects across disciplines and in partnership with students from Bronx Community College. Students will have the opportunity to develop field-based conference projects.

The sharp rise in African American literacy during Reconstruction gave rise to an increase in African American textual production and, especially, poetry. How did African American poetry respond to the conditions of emancipation and seek to exceed those conditions? This course aims to answer this question by taking the long view of African American poetry, beginning with Reconstruction and Nadir-era poets like Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charlotte Grimke. We will then follow their influence upon Harlem Renaissance poets like Langston Hughes and Jessie Redmon Fauset, Black arts and Black feminist poets like Gwendolyn Brooks and Amiri Baraka, and 21st-century poets like Terrance Hayes, Danez Smith, and Eve Ewing. This course aims to introduce students to the broad array of postemancipation poetry, so we will read across a variety of poetic forms in historical context. In so doing, we aim to better understand African American poetry, its relationship to history, and the ways in which poetry aims to describe Blackness as exceeding the juridical category of emancipation. Short assignments will include poetry recitation, pastiche, close readings, descriptions of form, and more.

The publication of the first issue of Trans Studies Quarterly in 2014 both announced a field and institutionalized already existing knowledge production. In the years since, trans studies, in general, and Black trans studies, in particular, have continued to expand, yielding new ways of thinking about identity, state violence, and the political production of life, among other things. This course seeks to acquaint students with recent developments in Black trans studies. We begin with writing about early American history to study the ways in which the understandings of gender by enslaved Africans differed from European colonial genders. We continue through the 19th century to read narratives of slavery alongside recent scholarship on such narratives in Black trans studies. And, finally, we turn to the 20th and 21st centuries, focusing on artistic production by Black trans authors in mediums such as film, visual art, and literature. On top of our central focus on the relationship between race and gender, we will pay special attention to resistance, incarceration, and visibility—engaging with cultural producers such as Janet Mock, Tourmaline, Rivers Solomon, CeCe Macdonald, Danez Smith, and more. Along the way, short critical assignments will help us to engage more closely and more deeply with research methods, cultural criticism, and individual cultural works.

African American literature has been intertwined with crime and punishment since at least the 17th century. One of the earliest textual sources about American slavery, the John Punch case, is a tribunal transcript detailing the crime of a Black man and his punishment of slavery. In the following 200 years, the slave narrative as a genre came to cohere around the climactic crime of stealing the property that is one’s self. After emancipation, African American writers decried public portrayals of Black people as criminal in prison literature, lynching narratives, and more. What, exactly, is the relationship between African American literature and crime? To answer this question, we will read African American literature chronologically, written by authors like Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Angela Davis, and Toni Morrison. In so doing, we aim to better understand both crime’s role in constituting African American literature and African American literature’s portrait of crime. Short assignments throughout the class (including critical and creative responses and short, close readings) aim to help us better understand the texts in the moments in which they were produced and to develop the skills necessary to approach these texts critically.

“For women, then, poetry is not a luxury,” Audre Lorde writes. “It is a vital necessity of our existence.” Poetry, Lorde continues, helps to bring about an understanding of what is, as well as to imagine what might be. This understanding of literature as shedding new light on existence and as sketching new possibilities held a profound political importance for the tradition of Black women’s writing, in which literature was called upon to demonstrate the worthiness of Emancipation as well as of civil rights. This seminar seeks to study that tradition, its political importance, and its artistic achievements by studying the long history of Black women’s writing in America across a variety of forms and genres. Over the course of the first semester, we will focus especially on the gendered and sexual conditions of slavery by authors who experienced it and by modern writers imagining it—reading works by authors such as Phyllis Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs, Toni Morrison, Natasha Trethewey, and more. Over the course of the second semester, we will turn to the post-Emancipation era, focusing especially on the evolving meanings of gender and sexuality amidst Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, and the contemporary—reading authors such as Ida B. Wells, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, and more. Along the way, we will do short creative and critical assignments to better acquaint ourselves with the methods of research, of thought, and more. During the fall semester, students will meet with the instructor weekly for individual conferences. In the spring, we will meet weekly or every other week, depending on students’ needs and the progress of their conference projects.

Though discussions of immigration in the United States have recently focused on the transnational movement of people from Central and South America, this country, in general, and the Eastern Seaboard, in particular, have long been porous to the movement of Black people from the Caribbean. From the 16th-century importation of Africans enslaved in Barbados to the Carolinas, through the immigration of African Americans to Haiti after Haitian Independence, up to the contemporary seasonal migration of Jamaican farmworkers to Upstate New York, Black people have long moved between the United States and the Caribbean. How might we understand the gendered, racial, and classed dimensions of migration differently if we focused on the recent history of Caribbean arts and letters? This course seeks to answer this question by studying anglophonic 20th- and 21st-century Caribbean women’s writing on migration between the metropole (be it New York City, London, or elsewhere) and the Caribbean. Reading across forms (novels, poetry, and so on) and genres (historical fiction, epics, etc.), we will attend to the writings of authors such as Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, Dionne Brand, M. Nourbese Philip, and more. Along the way, we’ll read recent works of theory and scholarship to advance our understanding of the texts and the subjects. In so doing, we will seek to understand how modern Caribbean women’s writing continues to influence Black studies and Black thought across the globe. Short assignments may include close readings, historical papers, and more.

Since the publication of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in 1951, scholars and artists have asked the book to speak to each moment in American history. Even today, the novel resonates with our most salient political problems: police violence, cross-racial activism, and so on. Yet, from its portrait of the Communist Party to its depiction of the 1943 Harlem Riot, Ellison’s novel told a historically specific tale. How and why has this novel transcended time and space? To answer this question, this class will first read Ellison’s sources: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Wright, W. E. B. Du Bois, and others. Then we will study Ellison’s early work and that of his contemporaries, such as novelist Ann Petry, musician Louis Armstrong, and the painter Romare Bearden. Then we will read Invisible Man slowly, carefully, and closely. From there, we will read academic works and artistic responses by scholars like Fred Moten and poets like Terrance Hayes. In so doing, we aim to better understand the changing meanings of Ellison’s novel, its importance to American history, and the evolution of Africana studies as a discipline. Along the way, our creative and critical assignments will better acquaint us with the various research methods and writing styles of literary criticism.