Courses

While historical records have long been the source from which we draw our picture of the past, it is with literature and art that we attempt to speculatively work out that which falls between the cracks of conventional archival documentation, that which cannot be contained by historical record— emotion, gesture, the sensory, the sonic, the inner life, the afterlife, the neglected and erased. This course will examine how contemporary black writers have imagined and attempted to represent black life from the late 17th to the early 20th centuries, asking what fiction can tell us about history. Reading these works as alternative archives, or “counterarchives,” which index the excess and fugitive material of black histories in the Americas, we will probe the uses, limits, and revelations of historical fictions, from the experimental and realist novel, to works of poetry and drama. Drawing on the work of various interdisciplinary scholars, we will use these historical fictions to explore and enter into urgent and ongoing conversations around black life & death, African-American history & memory, black aesthetics, and the problem of “The Archive.”