Narratives of Black Resistance & Resilience
Description:
The worldwide protests against police brutality and institutionalized racism following the killing of George Floyd in police custody on May 25th have inspired many people from all backgrounds to learn more about Black history, culture, and literature. As an educator, I believe that reading, discussion, and self-reflection are essential to both individual transformation and collective revolution. In that spirit, I am honored to lead a study group that traces narratives of Black resistance and resilience in the United States over the past two centuries. We will read five works of literature written by African Americans between 1861 and 2015, paying attention to the rhetorical strategies employed by these writers as well as focusing on how they reflect the particular historical moments in which they lived. No prior knowledge or background in literary analysis is required. I look forward to lively conversations about these amazing pieces of literature, conversations that allow us to reflect on the different ways that people of African descent in the United States have resisted white supremacy and created resilient communities.
Book List:
- Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs (1861)
- Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson (1912)
- A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry (1959)
- Zami: A New Spelling of My Name – A Biomythography by Audre Lorde (1982)
- Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015)
Women’s Narratives of Transformation
Description:
Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening is a quintessential feminist narrative about a woman who seeks to change her life in a time and place where women’s roles were tightly circumscribed. This 1899 piece will be the starting point for a 6-part series in which we will read and discuss how women writers grapple with intersecting modes of oppression and offer possibilities for personal and collective transformation. We will also read Nella Larsen’s 1928 novella Quicksand, which follows a young Black biracial woman’s search for home and Toni Morrison’s 1973 novel Sula, which chronicles a decades-long friendship between two Black women. Next we will read Bharati Mukherjee’s 1989 novel Jasmine about a young Pakistani widow who makes a new life for herself in the United States, followed by Edwidge Danticat’s haunting 1998 novel The Farming of Bones, which tells the story of a working-class woman who survives the government-sanctioned massacre of Haitians on the Haitian-Dominican Republic border in 1937. We will conclude by reading Terese Marie Mailhot’s stunning 2018 memoir Heart Berries,which wrestles with intergenerational trauma in Indigenous communities and the healing potential of art. In addition to considering how these authors thematize metamorphosis, we will also discuss how they transform literary genres such as the bildungsroman (coming-of-age narrative) and memoir. All are welcome, and no previous background in literary analysis is required. I look forward to embarking on a journey of transformation with participants as we discuss these potent, affecting, and timely narratives.
Sarita Nyasha Cannon is Professor of English at San Francisco State University where she teaches 20th-century American Literature. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with an A.B. in Literature, earned a Ph.D. in English from University of California, Berkeley, and held a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in American Indian Studies at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Cannon’s scholarship on multiethnic literatures, critical pedagogy, and feminist theory has appeared in Interdisciplinary Humanities, Asian American Literature: Discourses and Pedagogies,MELUS, The CEA Critic, African Voices, Ethnic Studies Review, and Biography. A global citizen committed to cross-cultural exchange, she has presented her work at conferences in Spain, France, Portugal, Japan, South Africa, Tunisia, Morocco, Ghana, and Australia. Dr. Cannon’s book manuscript, “Black-Native Autobiographical Acts: Navigating the Minefields of Authenticity,” examines Black-Native narratives across a wide range of autobiographical modes from the early twentieth century to the present in order to show how people of African and Indigenous ancestry have engaged in anti-hegemonic modes of self-inscription that challenge both racial and generic boundaries.