Like all Americans, black Americans live in a sexually repressive culture. And we have made all manner of compromise regarding our sexuality in order to live here. We have expended much energy trying to debunk the racist mythology which says our sexuality is depraved. Unfortunately, many of us have overcompensated and assimilated the Puritan value that sex is for procreation, occurs only between men and women, and is only valid within the confines of heterosexual marriage. . . . Like everyone else in America who is ambivalent in these respects, black folk have to live with the contradictions of this limited sexual system by repressing or closeting any other sexual/erotic urges, feelings, or desires. ~Cheryl Clarke, The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community (1983)

---

 

COURSE DESCRIPTION

This course focuses on sexuality in African American literature; moreover, this course is designed to provide students with theoretical and philosophical concepts of the African American sexuality as seen through various lenses such as history, politics, and economics. Discussions will include discourses of power, performance, culture, ritual, resistance, intersectionality, and the body as text. This course will familiarize students with established and emerging African American writers and poets and may include texts from Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Essex Hemphill, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Danielle Evans, Thomas Glave, and Natasha Trethewey. The course presents a mixture of lecture and video presentations. This course is a prerequisite for all advanced courses in literature.

COURSE READINGS

Week of August 17: Introduction to the Course

Week of August 24: Building a Critical Framework: What is Black Sexuality?

• Stacey Paton, “Who’s Afraid of Black Sexuality?”
• Cornel West, “Black Sexuality: The Taboo Subject” from Race Matters
• hooks, “Penis Passion”

Week of August 31: (Re)Constructing a Genealogy of Black Sexuality: Sexual Culture and the American Slavery Regime and Folklore

• Thomas Jefferson, Query 14, from Notes on the State of Virginia.
• Fredrick Douglass, excerpts from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself.
• Harriet Jacobs, excerpts from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself.
• Thomas Foster, “The Sexual Abuse of Black Men under American Slavery.”
• Toni Morrison, Chapter 10 from Beloved.

Week of September 7: (Re)Constructing a Genealogy of Black Sexuality: Sexual Culture and the American Slavery Regime and Folklore

• “On Slaveholders’ Sexual Abuse of Slaves.”
• Randolph Campbell and Donald Pickens, “My Dear Husband, A Slave’s Love Letter.”

Week of September 14: (Re)Constructing a Genealogy of Black Sexuality: Sexual Culture, Folklore, and the Blues

• Angela Davis, “I Used to Be Your Sweet Mama” from Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday.
• “Three Blues Songs”
• Sharon Bridgford, excerpt from loveconjure/blues.

 Week of September 21: O Taste and See That He Is Good: Black Erotics, Spirituality, and the Church

• Michael Eric Dyson, “When You Divide Body and Soul, Problems Multiply: The Black Church and Sexuality” from The Michael Eric Dyson Reader.
• Michael Eric Dyson, “Homotexualities: The Bible, Sexual Ethics, and the Theology of Homoeroticism” from The Michael Eric Dyson Reader.

 Week of September 28: Black Erotic Poetry and Poetics: Cartographies of Desire, Part 1

• Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” from Sister Outsider.
• Touré, “A Guest!,” from The Portable Promised Land.
• Selected Readings from The Best American Erotic Poems.

Week of October 5: Black Erotic Poetry and Poetics: Cartographies of Desire, Part 2

• L. Lamar Wilson, Selected Poems from Sacrilegion.
• Selected Readings from Erotique Noire

Week of October 12: Fall Break

• Finish up readings from previous week

Week of October 19: Embodied Curiosity and Queer Silences: Children, Teens, and the Question of Sexual Initiation; Or, Do Children Have a Sexuality?

• Zora Neale Hurston, excerpt from Their Eyes Were Watching God.
• Essex Hemphill, “Ceremonies” from Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry.
• Junot Diaz, “Miss Lora” from This Is How You Lose Her.
• Tricia Rose, “Millie” from Longing to Tell.
• Langston Hughes, “Blessed Assurance.”

 Week of October 26: Black Erotics and Visual Culture: Myth and Memory, Part 1

• Carla Williams, “The Erotic Image is Naked and Dark” from Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography.
• Keith Harris, “D’Angelo and the Visualization of the Black Male Body.”

Week of November 2: Black Erotics and Visual Culture: Myth and Memory, Part 2

• Nicole Fleetwood, “The Case of Rihanna.”
• Jennifer Nash, “Black Anality”
• Presentation of Erotic Photography

 Week of November 9: Serious Pleasures: Sexistentialism, Hypersexuality, and Sex as Redemptive Metaphor, Part 1

• Walter Mosley, Killing Johnny Fry, pp. 1-129.

Week of November 16: Serious Pleasures: Sexistentialism, Hypersexuality, and Sex as Redemptive Metaphor, Part 2

• Walter Mosley, Killing Johnny Fry, pp. 130-end.

Week of November 23:

• Film, Pariah (2011)

 Week of November 30: Where do we go from here?

• Due Analysis of Reading Practices