African American Religion Through the Literary Imagination

In this course, we will examine and trouble the notion of African American religion by reading different genres of literature. By engaging slave narratives, autobiography, fiction, and the critical essay, the aim of the course will be to re-imagine categories that are associated with black religion: piety, spiritual, opacity, trauma, liberation, transgression, anguish, intersectionality, and the 'afterlife of slavery.' Two general ideas will motivate the direction(s) of the course. For one, black religiosity is not reducible to institutional forms like the church. Secondly, any endeavor to study black piety, or blackness more generally, requires multiple genres and approaches.