How is the personal political? How do personal stories and histories offer models of reckoning with race, immigration, belonging, justice, and nationhood? How is the critical made creative and the creative made critical?

This course examines how creative non-fiction imagines social transformation and builds paths toward racial consciousness and solidarity. Through the many forms of creative non-fiction— autobiography, essay, memoir, testimonio, and travelogue, among others—we will explore the connections between personal and local experiences of oppression and national and global forms of racism, coloniality, and empire in our current moment.

Reading as global citizens and as writers, students will delve into the creative, rhetorical, and critical strategies through which non-fictional narratives allow us to think collectively. They will also tap into their own creative imagination of racial consciousness, solidarity, and justice to craft and write their own non-fiction narratives.

This course will focus on contemporary, twenty-first century non-fiction, autobiographical texts, likely including work by Asha Bandele, Patrisse Cullors, Cherríe Moraga, Cathy Park Hong, Arundhati Roy, Tracy K. Smith, and Jesmyn Ward, as well as essay collections such as The Fire this Time and Wise Latinas.

This course will be co-taught by Swati Rana and Maria Sintura.