Themester

Engaging with classic and current scholarship, travel literature, advertisements, music, poetry, film, and more, we will examine when, where, how, and why particular stereotypes about Black Women were created, and by whom. We will simultaneously discuss how Black Women have grappled with race, class, gender and sexuality, struggling to create lives and images that reflect their own understanding of liberty, power, equality, rights, citizenship, and self. Using primary and secondary sources, we will study the past through the words of Black Women and sharpen our ability to evaluate, analyze, and interpret the arguments of leading scholars. Instead of attempting to understand all of Black Women’s history, or even every image that exists in the US context, we will focus on interrogating certain images (and certain time periods) more closely than others. This class is thus organized thematically, not chronologically; it is not meant to be an exhaustive examination of Black Women’s History. I teach a different course for that!

This courses is also listed under Gender Studies GNDR-G 302 and History HIST-A 394.

Instructor: Dr. A. Myers

• S&H
• DUS
• What are CASE requirements?