Black Women Writing the City

During the twentieth century in the U.S., millions of Black Americans migrated from the rural South to the urban North, ushering in new forms of sensory and social experience. This course focuses on Black women’s relationship to the modern city, from the fin de siècle, through the Civil Rights Era, to the present-day. Across a variety of genres and contexts—including novels, poetry, plays, memoir, journalism, diaries, manifestos, spoken word and travelogues—Black writers have imagined and theorized femininity through the ever-shifting contours of the metropolis. While traditional accounts of urban modernity tend to take a masculine frame, our course will remain grounded in contemporary queer and feminist critique, asking: how do the physical, material, and architectural dimensions of the city impact women’s conceptions of selfhood? How do semi-public, semi-private spaces, such as cafes, offices, nightclubs, and cabarets, enable (or fail to enable) community and group belonging? How might such spaces nurture queer of color communities specifically? What forms of economic racism and segregation did women of color encounter, and what strategies did they deploy to counteract them? Is it possible for a Black woman to remain “private in public”? What kinds of industrial and technological developments enhanced women’s independence and financial freedoms, and which, like state surveillance, ultimately impeded—and continue to impede—their ability to survive and flourish? 

Primary authors will include Jessie Redmon Fauset, Dorothy West, Marita Bonner, Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, Ntozake Shange, Toni Morrison, Shay Youngblood, Sarah Broom and Raven Leilani, supplemented by short critical readings by such writers as Audre Lorde and Saidiya Hartman. Combining theoretical and literary analysis with regular fieldwork in New York City—including visits to the Schomburg Center and the Studio Museum in Harlem—the seminar ultimately encourages students to think creatively and rigorously about their own relationship to race, gender, and urban experience.