Topics in the Literature of American Cultures

Joy, grief, anxiety, shame, desire, jealousy, fear, hope: emotions are a familiar part of ordinary life. We tend to think of feelings as private and individual, but emotions are also public, social, and political, at the same time that publics and politics are very much emotional. Emotions play a role in galvanizing social movements and political campaigns, and they serve to create collectives as well as to determine who is excluded. In this class, we will be particularly concerned with the complex affective experiences that accompany processes of racialization – and their intersections with gender, class, and sexuality – in American life. From “black anger” to “white guilt,” from the “fiery” Latina to the “impassive” Asian, who is understood to be emotional and in what ways is a cultural and historical question. At the same time, the experience of being racialized subjects has psychic implications that accompany the more obvious economic and structural effects of discrimination.

We will think about these difficult topics by studying a range of aesthetic texts (novels, memoirs, poems, plays, essays, and films) from the mid-20th century to the present. Examining the relations between larger social structures and the lived experience of individuals marked by race, gender, class, and sexuality, we will ask what emotions do, how they work, what their histories are, how they circulate, or conversely how they “stick” to certain people or certain experiences.