A number of people have expressed an interest in the Major Works syllabus in the first year of the UMass Afro-American Studies doctoral program. Here is the Fall syllabus.
Selections from Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa and Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery
Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone
Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past, and selections from Mintz and Price, The Birth of African American Culture and Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks
Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women
Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll
Slave Narratives of Douglass, Equiano, and Jacobs (in Gates, Classic American Slave Narratives)
Antebellum poetry, including Wheatley (in Sherman, African American Poetry 1773-1927
Martin Delany, Blake
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Holiday. No class
Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans
C.L.R. James, Black Jacobins
Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts
James and Lois Horton, In Hope of Liberty
Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists
Jean Humez, Harriet Tubman
Don Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic
Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long
Eric Foner, Reconstruction
No class (Thursday schedule)
Frances E. W. Harper, Iola Leroy
Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem Renaissance Poetry, including Paul Laurence Dunbar (in Sherman, African American Poetry of the Nineteenth Century)
Mellonee Burnim and Portia Maultsby, African American Music
Charles Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales
James Weldon Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (in Three Negro Classics)
Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind
August Meier, Negro Thought in America; Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (in Three Negro Classics
James Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South
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2 comments:
Aaah good to see James Anderson on that list.I learned a great deal from that book, particularly regarding the motivations of early American "philanthropist" in their contribution to black education.
The list is pretty impressive, though I am a little surprised at the absence of some formidable names. John Henrik Clarke, Kwame Nkrumah, Carter G woodson, and is it possible W.E.B Du Bois?
Amato, the list was a subject of constant struggle. Du Bois' BLACK RECONSTRUCTION was on it at first, but somehow got displaced. The department teaches a whole course on Du Bois, needless to say. This is why John Bracey argued for one hundred books. For as long as humanists have been around, they have been creating canons and fighting canon wars over which books to include and which to exclude. No two members of the department ever agreed completely. My attitude was that getting the students to read vast amounts of good stuff was all that mattered.
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