LIT 499-08 The Trope of Epiphanal Blackness
Course meetings: Wednesday 5:30-8:20pm
Professor: Piper Williams
I employ the term “epiphanal blackness” to define the moment when what it means to be black is textually revealed throughout African American literature. The complicated ideas of race operating in the United States and the “notions” we hold about the meaning of race, both shape and are shaped by these textual moments. The moments when the writers and/or their characters first recognize that their race – perhaps embodied in skin or merely in notions of “blood”- has deep meaning in the context of American identity are ubiquitous in prominent texts in the African American literary canon. This course will explore the contradictions and ambiguities which become fundamental to the way race is conceived: blacks are seen and understood as different, while in their minds they know they also alike, as American, or at least human, but in any event shut out from the dominant society. It is this trope of “epiphanal blackness” and its subsequent implications for the construction of racial identity that we will trace in fiction, autobiography and poetry in the canon of African American/Black literature. In addition, we will place the study of the trope of “epiphanal blackness” in the context of African American literary theory.