TO UPEND A WORLD: ABOLITIONIST POETICS

In our class we will discuss abolition as a name for a set of imaginings that call for complete and total eradication of systems ("Worlds") that perpetuate collective harms. We will think about how capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy limit our imaginations, and how we can think in ways that remake our world. Students will read essays by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Pheng Cheah, Denise F. DaSilva, Edouard Glissant, and Christina Sharpe, and will trouble received readings of significant literary texts through abolitionist lenses to discern a range of liberatory strategies in the poetry, literary nonfiction, and fiction of writers including Audre Lorde, W.E.B. DuBois, James Baldwin, Lucille Clifton, M Nourbese Philip, Robin Coste Lewis, Etheridge Knight, Randall Horton, dg nanouk okpik, and Jackie Wang. As a class, students will discuss and consider these writers’, as well as their own, interventions in the context of literature's world-making power. (*Readings subject to change).