LIT 6357
The Folk in Caribbean and African American LiteratureLeah Rosenberg The experiences and culture of black peasants, sharecroppers, and
the urban proletariat have come to be defining characteristics of both
Caribbean and African American literatures. In both traditions, however,
intellectuals have had bitter debates about how prominent black folk
culture should be and what aspects of folk culture deserve literary
attention. Thus, W.E.B. Du Bois made The Crisis a venue for
a public debate on the literary representation of African Americans
and famously commented that Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928)
focused so much on the “underworld” of cabarets and prostitutes
that he felt the need for a bath. Before he immigrated to the United
States in 1912, McKay had been at the center of a parallel debate in
the Jamaican press concerning the legitimacy of “dialect” poetry.
Intellectuals were still bitterly divided on the question of the folk
in Caribbean in the 1970s. Focusing on the Harlem Renaissance and the
emergence of Caribbean literature in the early twentieth century, this
course studies the literary representation of the folk as a means of
evaluating the founding paradigms of African American and Caribbean
literature and literary studies. Authors will include W.E.B.
DuBois, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Langston Hughes,
Jean Rhys, Jean Toomer, Sam Selvon, Kamau Brathwaite, Louise Bennett,
and George Lamming.  top
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6357