White Negroes

Posted in Course Offerings, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2013-01-17 16:37Z by Steven

White Negroes

Guy Foster, Assistant Professor of English

Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine
Africana Studies/Gender and Women’s Studies
Spring 2013

Close readings of literary and filmic texts that interrogate widespread beliefs in the fixity of racial categories and the broad assumptions these beliefs often engender. Investigates “whiteness” and “blackness” as unstable and fractured ideological constructs. These are constructs that, while socially and historically produced, are no less “real” in their tangible effects, whether internal or external. Includes works by Charles Chesnutt, Nella Larsen, Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, John Howard Griffin, Sandra Bernhard, and Warren Beatty.

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Interracial Narratives

Posted in Course Offerings, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2013-01-17 16:29Z by Steven

Interracial Narratives

Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine
Africana Studies
Fall 2012

Guy Foster, Assistant Professor of English

Examines the stories that Americans have told about intimate relationships that cross the color line in twentieth- and twenty-first-century imaginative and theoretical texts. Considers how these stories have differed according to whether the participants are heterosexual or homosexual, men or women, Black, White, Asian, Latino, or indigenous. Explores the impact historically changing notions of race, gender, sexuality, and U.S. citizenship have had on the production of these stories. Texts include literature, film, Internet dating sites, and contemporary debates around mixed-race identity and the United States census.

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