Courses

This class focuses on texts written by and about people of African descent in the British Atlantic world of the long eighteenth century. As we read fiction and nonfiction, prose and poetry, autobiography and polemic, we will examine the literary and rhetorical techniques that authors use to influence their readers’ feelings about slavery and the slave trade, and we will think more broadly about how literature can manipulate feelings for political ends. While we’ll pay especially close attention to the sentiments of sympathy, empathy, and fellow-feeling, we’ll also consider other feelings that these texts express or provoke—feelings like anger, fear, or even apathy. Finally, we’ll ask how the experience of Blackness and enslavement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century—and literary representations of that experience—might inform our understanding of contemporary racial justice movements.