This course introduces students to the African-American literary tradition and facilitates critical thinking, reading, and writing through the interpretation of texts significant to the African-American experience. The course exposes students to such issues as literacy and Enlightenment values, power relations, survival and resistance strategies, race relations and identity formation, and changing literary standards and writers' responses to those changes. Literature to be read, discussed, and analyzed may include slave narratives, novels, short stories, plays, poems, spirituals, lyrics, speeches, essays, and articles conceived by such writers as Wheatley, Equiano, Douglass, Chesnutt, Johnson, Washington, Du Bois, Larsen, Hughes, Hurston, Locke, Toomer, Garvey, Attaway, Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, Baraka, Kincaid, Morrison, and Walker. (3 billable contact hrs)