Selected Topics in Feminist Studies

LIT390S-5-01 Black Feminist Experimentation

With Professor Zakiyyah Jackson

This course examines black feminist experimentation in literature, historiography, theory, and film. It seeks to investigate what yields from breaking out of the confines of formal artistic and literary conventions and narrow depictions of black womanhood and femininity. What new forms emerge from the ruins of convention and the expected? What is left of gender and sexual identity in the face of black feminist rule breaking? If standard protocols of narrative and “authentic” and “positive” representation are refused, what might be gained? This course is a laboratory for thought, for the exploration of the limits of literary and visual forms and what lies beyond the strictures of racialized notions of type and aesthetic taste.