2017-18 Academic Catalog

At the end of the nineteenth century, amidst legalized segregation and widespread racism, U.S. black writers undertook radical experiments in literary art. We will read Charles Chesnutt, W.E.B. Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, and Ida B. Wells, considering their strategies to inspire readers’ empathy and to shape new possibilities in black life. We will end by discussing how conceptions of empathy in our own moment influence black writing, in works such as Paul Beatty’s The Sellout (2015) or Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead (2017).