AP/HUMA 3314 6.00

Black Literatures and Cultures In Canada

This course examines the wide range of lives, experiences and histories of Black peoples in Canada by focusing on expressive cultures. The approach is broadly interdisciplinary and we will study a range of Black Canadian literature (novels, poetry, plays) as well as other forms of cultural production such as film, musics, and visual art. Through these creative forms the course will explore how BlackAfrican-Canadian imaginaries are rendered. Our inquiries will be supported by various historical and theoretical non-fiction readings that will offer socio-historical contexts and a critical vocabulary for thinking about the various manifestations of blackness in Canada. While the course works through an anti-oppression framework that aims to interrogate historical and contemporary anti-Black racism in Canada, it also recognizes the importance of Black Canadian cultural production in itself. In other words, the course will think about Black Canadian expressive cultures as acts of resistance, and also as important sites through which alternate communities, histories, and politics are constituted within dominant discourses of the Canadian nation-state. Finally, the course also seeks to situate Canada within a diasporic context, to understand the ways in which Black Canadian artists, theorists and cultural producers participate in broader transnational and outer-national conversations.

Course credit exclusions: For HUMA 3314 6.0: HUMA 3315 3.0; For HUMA 3315 3.0: HUMA 3314 6.0

PRIOR TO FALL 2009: Course credit exclusion: AS/HUMA 3315 3.00.