ENGL 360 A1: Race and Belonging in American Writing

T. Zackodnik

This course will study literature and other cultural texts with a view to considering how race becomes central to narratives of American belonging. Such a focus seems particularly apt in a sustained period of open racism within so-called political discourse, the rise of facism, the tendency to call white nationalism "the Right '' politically, and the continued exercise of extrajudicial police violence and white-person-weaponization. In addition to reading critical race theory, we will study literature by white, African-, Asian-, and Native-Americans from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.