Seminar: "Passing" and "Whiteness" in American Literature and Culture - Vertiefungsmodul - Details

Seminar: "Passing" and "Whiteness" in American Literature and Culture - Vertiefungsmodul - Details

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General information

Course name Seminar: "Passing" and "Whiteness" in American Literature and Culture - Vertiefungsmodul
Course number ANG.04629.02; ANG.06145.02
Semester WiSe 2024/25
Current number of participants 18
expected number of participants 25
Home institute Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
Courses type Seminar in category Offizielle Lehrveranstaltungen
Next date Thursday, 10.10.2024 12:15 - 13:45, Room: Seminarraum 3 [AKStr.35] (Angl.)
SWS 2

Fields of study

Module assignments

Comment/Description

Critical Race Theory, Critical Whiteness Studies, and Black Lives Matter have put the spotlight on constructions of “whiteness.” Our seminar will focus on the ways in which “whiteness” is treated in African American fiction from modernism to the present era. We will begin our course with essays written by Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Theorists and African American authors (e.g., excerpts from Toni Morrison's pathbreaking Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination) and then examine several literary texts that highlight various roles of “whiteness”: e.g., Black characters “passing” as white (e.g., James Weldon Johnson’s novella An Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, 1912, excerpts from Nella Larson’s novel Passing, 1929), “whiteness” as a social problem (two essays taken from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, 1963), and whiteness and racial violence (Antoinette Nwandu’s play Pass Over, 2017). Our course will also cover the critical debate on “whiteness” in academia and popular media.

Most of the course material will be made available on the ILIAS platform.

Please purchase:
Antoinette Nwandu, Pass Over.