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This class traverses a wide array of African Diasporic literatures across the 20th and 21st centuries. We will discuss various interventions, geographic locations, and periods such as the New Negro Movement and Negritude, African decolonization, the Black Arts Movement, Black feminist formations of Black Studies and Black liberation, Caribbean cosmologies, Afro-pessimism, and Afro-futurism. In doing so, we will carefully assess the complexity and dynamism of African diasporic cultures, and consider how are they shaped by factors such as class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, language, colonialism, and imperialism. To investigate these questions, this course employs an interdisciplinary approach, integrating materials from literary studies, history, ethnic and gender studies, media and film studies, and sociology. We will read some academic materials about African Diasporic literatures, but we will spend most of the semester reading, listening to, and viewing what a range of Afro-descended people have asserted about their own individual and collective identities. Rather than settle on a final definition of “African,” “Diaspora,” or even “Literature,” we will explore these terms as products of on-going dialogue, debate, and change, all shaped by aspects of cultural differences and social power, both within and up against the African Diaspora.