Race & Gender in Literature

Course Description: From African Americans, East Asian/South Asian Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, and “white” ethnics, students will explore how cultural texts’ impact on race is incredibly important in an era in which students are constantly bombarded with issues of race and gender in music, television, films, and books. Students in this course will develop tools to analyze how literature and popular culture both reinforce and resist dominant notions of race, gender, and various other identities. Through novels and various non-fiction readings, students will explore themes such as ethnic and racial stereotypes, ethnicity and gender, assimilation versus cultural heritage/memory, ethnogenesis and translating experiences into a new culture and language.

Some of the core texts to be read will include: 

    - The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander (excerpts)
    - The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
    - The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
    - Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare
    - Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia Butler

Additional non-fiction, fiction, poetry and cinematic sources will be used to broaden students' understanding. 


Image result for new jim crow Image result for handmaid's tale book Hardcover The Woman Warrior : Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts Book Cover artImage result for bloodchild and other stories butler