This course is an advanced survey of African American Literature in the 20-21st Centuries. We examine canonical writings by Black Americans from the 20th and 21st centuries such as Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, Ntozake Shange and others. This course focuses particularly on the way form and structure develop over time in African American writing as a mode of expressing the human condition in renewed ways. The texts we read highlight innovation and experimentation in narrative and form particularly as means of shaping experience as well as proposing new routes to creative, personal and structural freedom. We’ll pay attention to critical, representational, and social concerns like gender, community, power, and history.