Slavery: A Literary History

This course aims to provide a long view of literary representations and responses to slavery and the slave trade in the Americas from William Shakespeare to Toni Morrison and Edward P. Jones. Expressing the conflicted public conscience—and perhaps the collective unconscious—of a nation, literature registers vividly the human costs (and profits) and dehumanizing consequences of a social practice whose legacy still haunts and implicates us. We will study some of the major texts that stage the central crises in human relations, social institutions, and human identity provoked by slavery, considering in particular how these texts represent the perverse dynamics and identifications of the master-slave relationship; the systematic assaults on identity and community developed and practiced in slave-owning cultures; modes of resistance, survival, and subversion cultivated by slave communities and individuals to preserve their humanity and reclaim their liberty; and retrospective constructions of and meditations on slavery and its historical consequences. Since literary structure and style are not only representational but also a means of subversion, resistance, and reclamation, we will do a lot of close reading. Readings will be drawn from the works of William Shakespeare, Aime Cesaire, Aphra Behn, Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and Edward P. Jones. Conference work may entail more extended work in any of these writers or literary modes or in other writers engaged in the representation and interrogation of slavery, may be developed around a major theme or topic, and may include background study in history, philosophy, geography, politics, or theory.