Spring Elective: “From Books to Bebop and Bearden to Basquiat and Beyonce”: African-American Literature and Art since World War II
Terms: 1
Grades: 11, 12, PG
This course will serve as an introduction € a limited survey € to the vibrant, near eight€decade (1945€2022) span of creativity of African€American artists across all mediums: literary, visual, and performance arts. Paralleling the technological innovation and sweeping social change prompted by the war, African American art transformed. The late 1940s and 1950€™s heard a new form of jazz in be€bop, Ralph Ellison€™s novel Invisible Man articulated a higher consciousness, Lorraine Hansberry staged the complexity of African€American family life; and visual artists Romare Bearden and Charles Alston, relying on fresh approaches to line, color, and texture, captured black life in vibrant and abstract ways. This period was followed by the fully€voiced Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, and, again, writers and other artists offered the humanity of the collective experience in seminal works, like John Coltrane€™s A Love Supreme, the poetry of Amiri Baraka and Nikki Giovanni, and the full catalog of Motown Records. With the 1970s arrived novels by Toni Morrison and Ishmael Reed and full seasons of Dance Theater of Harlem. The 1980s are asterisked with the advent of hip€hop, and astride with this was the explosive ascension of painter Jean Michel Basquiat. Nearly all of this expanse of black expression is captured in the photography of Gordon Parks and in the sharp pen of James Baldwin. Even further, this period is staged in the plays of August Wilson and poetry of Rita Dove. The 1990s and 2000s offer the work of film makers Julia Dash, Spike Lee, Ava DuVernay, and Barry Jenkins as striking voices in American cinema; the photography of Devin Allen upholds the legacy of Gordon Parks; Kara Walker€™s visual art adds to the collective understanding of American history and artistic expression; and the genre€fusing music of Robert Glasper and the multimedia creations of Beyonce Knowles, with the writing of Ta€Nehisi Coates extend African€American traditions of expression.
Required texts: Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man; Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon