The Afro-Feminist Novel

What are the affordances of the novel for modern and contemporary feminisms? 

The rise of the novel is often associated with the eighteenth-century in Britain, as authors broke from the conventions of poetry, theater, and romance to reflect contemporary philosophical, economic and social trends of the European Enlightenment (including the rapid increase in female readership). Across the subsequent centuries, the novel—with its emphasis on social realism, psychological depth, and intricate plotlines—has proven to be a shifting, elusive, and often counterintuitive form, taken up and reinvented by figures around the world. This class asks, first: What makes a novel a novel? We will begin by identifying some of the major aesthetic features that have historically defined this slippery genre, from its 18th century underpinnings, to Victorian realism, to the exuberant experimentation of the modernist and postmodernist eras. But we’ll quickly turn our attention to how those features get interrupted, re-interpreted, and even exploded by Black and feminist writers of the 20th century, many of whom look to different, more global and transhistorical models for achieving their vision.   

The course will be grounded in five experimental novels written by Black women between the years 1930 and 2000, which emerged to more and less popular success and critical acclaim: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); Ann Petry’s The Narrows (1953); Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters (1980); Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987); and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000). We’ll also spend some time with other feminist novel contemporaries, including Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1953). A final project will ask students to identify a 21st century Afro-feminist novel—ideally one written in the last decade—that they would nominate as present-day inheritor of this heterogenous and dynamic form, with a critical introduction explaining their choice.