This is the course blog for the seminar in U.S. Black Freedom Movements. Students will be submitting their work here throughout the semester. Students can submit links, video clips, and their own thoughts on reading materials and even current events or conversations that intersect with the course.
I recently listened to Terry Gross's interview with Achebe on the public radio program, "Fresh Air." In their discussion of one of his novels, Achebe states that a novel should not offer a prescription but a headache. I found this assertion so compelling as a student of literature. I also think his rubric, coming from the necessary work of literature in the postcolonial Nigerian context. It made me think about Walker's _Meridian_ as itself an anti-U.S. apartheid novel. Meridian herself suffers from actual headaches, but does the novel produce a headache for the reader? How does its moral complexity trouble the status quo or disorient the reader's belief system(s)?
I recently listened to Terry Gross's interview with Achebe on the public radio program, "Fresh Air." In their discussion of one of his novels, Achebe states that a novel should not offer a prescription but a headache. I found this assertion so compelling as a student of literature. I also think his rubric, coming from the necessary work of literature in the postcolonial Nigerian context. It made me think about Walker's _Meridian_ as itself an anti-U.S. apartheid novel. Meridian herself suffers from actual headaches, but does the novel produce a headache for the reader? How does its moral complexity trouble the status quo or disorient the reader's belief system(s)?
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