American Women Writers of Color: Chinese American, African American
(download Syllabus .doc file(word))

Course Plan:

It is a commonplace of feminist literary criticism that Chinese-American and African-American women’s fiction reflects these women’s struggle with racist, sexist, and classist oppression, both within their own ethnic communities and in the larger culture. We will certainly explore the literary implications of this struggle in our course. But we will also look at a post-modern, dimension of the experience of women of color, brought about in a larger culture in which racial and cultural mixing is becoming more prevalent and racial and ethnic identities more fluid.

For our authors, then, often the key issue is not how a woman of color confronts the oppression of the larger white society, but rather, how she understands her own racial and ethnic identity to the extent that she is assimilated into this larger society and perhaps biologically implicated in it through her own mixed blood—to the extent that she is, in effect, a “cultural mulatto” [the term comes from post-modern African-American literary criticism]. We will see that the cultural and political complexities of the situations of cultural-mulatto women give rise to rich literary textures, beginning with their successful struggles to find any literary voice at all.

Finding your own voice should be an important part of your experience in taking this course. You will have a variety of opportunities to write for me (see below), and you will also be encouraged to participate actively in class.