Department of English

People in the United States talk about race, and we always have. Not only is discourse about race ubiquitous, but it is difficult to imagine some element of our public culture that is not, either directly or indirectly, implicated in the history of race and racism in the United States. Whenever we write or speak about race, and whatever we say about it, race is precipitated through our words. Race in the form of a rhetorical invention profoundly impacts our culture.

This course will take a primarily historical perspective on the relationship between rhetoric and race, exploring the possibilities and implications entailed by an understanding of race as a rhetorical phenomenon. We’ll begin with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., exploring similarities and differences in their public discourse to develop a tentative interpretive framework that we will then utilize and modify as we engage with subsequent course materials.

Some of the speakers, writers, and topics that we may study, in addition to key works by Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., would include: so-called “slave revolts,” Nat Turner, intersectionalities of race and gender, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, relevant Supreme Court decisions, Ida B. Wells, Jim Crow, W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Black Nationalism, James Baldwin, white privilege, affirmative action, Barack Obama, and Black Lives Matter.

• DUS
• IW
• What are CASE requirements?