Fall Quarter of my senior year, I took the first class in a year long series for the English departmental honors program. The class title was, "Revisiting History: Modern Black Narratives of Slavery, Empire, and Resistance," and was taught by Professor Laura Chrisman. The class focused on black American, Caribbean, and African writers, from the 20th- and 21st centuries and how they have represented historical experience and perceptions of temporality. In the class, we explored what it meant for writers to revisit particular historical moments from the context of their own historical moment and also what it meant for us as readers to be encountering these materials from our own historical placement. We started out by reading some theoretical texts, like Marx and Engels's "The Communist Manifesto," selections from Ernst Bloch's book, The Principle of Hope, as well as selections from texts by Walter Benjamin, David Scott, and Branwen Jones. We then moved onto the primary texts of the class, which included two novels (Arna Bontemps, Black Thunder (1937); Yvonne Vera, Nehanda (1993)) and two plays (CLR James, Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History (1934); Danai Gurira, The Convert (2012)). The structure of the class was that we would read some of the text, write a 300 word discussion post about the texts before class, and then discuss in class what we found interesting about the readings. We also had to write a midterm paper (5-6 pages) and a final paper (10-12 pages). I wrote my midterm paper on two of the characters in the play about Toussaint Louverture and I wrote my final paper on how European colonialism doubly exploits women through the institution of patriarchy (both papers are linked below). I learned a lot in this class about colonialism and how it affects indigenous peoples and their cultures. I just wish that the class had more instruction instead of being a seminar where the students discussed the readings without much input from the professor. I wish the information I learned in this class had more practical application to me personally as well. I ended up doing okay in the class (3.5 GPA), but I found it hard to stay motivated to do the work throughout the quarter. This was because I thought the class was pretty boring, to be completely honest. One thing I did like about it, however, was the small class size. There were only 14 of us, so I got to make personal connections with many of the other students.
english_494_midterm_paper.docx | |
File Size: | 28 kb |
File Type: | docx |
english_494_final_paper.docx | |
File Size: | 45 kb |
File Type: | docx |