AAS 4970 / ENGL 4010: Topics in African American Culture: African American Folklore, Fiction, and Film: Syllabus Materials

A gripping, page-turning novel set in Jim Crow Florida that follows Robert Stephens Jr. as he's sent to a segregated reform school that is a chamber of terrors where he sees the horrors of racism and injustice, for the living, and the dead.

The story collection that hailed the arrival of an essential voice in southern literature--a sharp, rich exploration of what it means to poor, Black, and gay in the United States.

Inspired by the author's passion for African American culture and vernacular traditions, African American Folklore: An Encyclopedia for Students thoroughly addresses key elements and motifs in black American folklore--especially those that have influenced American culture.

Langston Collin Wilkins returns to the city where he grew up to illuminate the complex relationship between place, identity, and music in Houston's hip hop culture.

Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation demonstrates how folklore studies became a battleground across which issues of racial identity and difference were asserted and debated at the turn of the twentieth century.

A ground breaking study of proverbs in African-American speech from slave times to the present.

To protect their identity and values, Africans enslaved in America transformed various familiar character types to create folk heroes who offered models of behavior both recognizable to them as African people and adaptable to their situation in America.

Because Turner was able to monitor these contemporary legends as they unfolded and played themselves out, rigorous analysis was possible. What follows, then, is an examination of the themes common to these contemporary items and related historical ones, and an explanation for their persistence.

What racist rumors about Barack Obama tell us about the intractability of racism in American politics.

Mutha' is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture explores the importance of sexual desire in the formation of radical Black females' subjectivities in Black women's culture through the trope of the indefinable trickster figure.

The final film by filmmaker Marlon Riggs, Black Is--Black Ain't, jumps into the middle of explosive debates over Black identity.

Based on a true story, American Gangster is the story of two men: Frank Lucas, former driver, bouncer, and collector for Bumpy Johnson, the so-called Robin Hood of Harlem; and Richie Roberts, night-school lawyer, detective, and honest cop.

Story of a large African-American family as they prepare to move North from the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia at the dawn of the 20th century.