Course description
This course examines fiction and film from Haiti, Cuba, and Harlem in the first half of the twentieth century, when authors Jacques Roumain, Nicolás Guillén, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston explored each other's societies while challenging their own. Their fiction, poetry, and essays engage the experience of slavery and its legacies, resistance and revolution, and differing paths for development and progress. The course combines aesthetic analysis of literature, film, and music with an understanding of historical and political contexts. We discuss what we can learn about societies from their cultural production; how novels and film engage and trouble us; and how we categorize and evaluate works of art that make a political statement.
