ENGL 224L: Aesthetics & Black Womanhood: Contemporary Transatlantic Women's Novels

This course explores novels by contemporary African American and Black British women writers who encourage us to rethink our understandings of womanhood and racial identity. It emphasizes aesthetics as a mode of resistance by examining the stylistic innovations employed by contemporary Black women writers to revise oppressive, dominant representations of blackness and womanhood in the US and the UK. The course traces the authors' use of traditional African and Black diasporic beliefs to infuse genres like science fiction and horror with new understandings of Black womanhood that are not restricted to heteronormative, white-centering conceptions of identity. Authors include Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, Helen Oyeyemi, Jackie Kay, Octavia Butler, and Rivers Solomon.