Description
In this interdisciplinary course we will study the history, literature and culture of the American South, with a special focus on the role the memories and legacies of the South’s “peculiar institution” of slavery have played in the imagining of regional and racial identities. Slavery produced a distinct regional culture, which on the one hand was divided by race, but which was also made and embraced by both whites and blacks. After the Civil War, the white South used literature and films such as Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind to construct the myth of the “Old South” and the ideology of the “Lost Cause” that romanticized the region’s slavery past and criticized the North’s attempt to reconstruct the South. These nostalgic white representations of the South are challenged by both black and white southern writers such as Charles Chesnutt, William Faulkner, and Ernest Gaines, who expose the racist politics of the Jim Crow South and criticize the “New” South’s regeneration through violence. We will also study the role that gender and class have played in constructing the “Old South” and the ways in which Southern women such as Harriet Jacobs, Anne Moody, and Dorothy Allison have deconstructed conventional definitions of southern femininity, showing the racial and class prejudices that underwrite them. Finally, we’ll look at the black struggle for social and political equality from the Reconstruction Era through the civil rights movement, culminating in the election of Barack Obama, the first African-American president. While the main focus of the course will be on black-white relations, the course will also consider the South as a region that is becoming increasingly culturally diverse.
Teaching method
Two-hour seminar per week
Admission requirements
Course objectives
This course aims to provide insight into the history, literature and culture of the U.S. South from slavery to the present as well as scholarly and theoretical debates about race and racism in the south and to teach students to critically analyze historical, literary and cultural texts in their historical context and from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Required reading
C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (Oxford UP, 2001).
James C. Cobb, Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (Oxford UP, 2007).
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Oxford Schomburg Library).
Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (Dover).
Ernest Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying (Vintage).
Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina (Plume).
William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses (Vintage).
Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (Mass Market).
Selected shorter texts on Blackboard.
Test method
Oral presentation and class participation (30%) and research paper (70%).
Time table
Click here for the timetable.
Information
English Department, P.N. van Eyckhof 4, room 102c. Phone: 071 527 2144, or by mail: english@hum.leidenuniv.nl.
Registration
Students can register through U-twist before 15 July, After 15 July students can only register through the Departmental Office.
Blackboard
A Blackboard site will be made available, to which all students should sign up before the beginning of the semester.
Remarks
This is a required course for MA-students who wish to specialize in American Studies.