About the class:
The contemporary ancestor-writers Toni Morrison and James Baldwin’s fiction and non-fiction act as response to the rhetorical questioning of formerly enslaved ancestors such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth and serve as the human portraiture to the caricature creation of black people by white people throughout American history. Morrison and Baldwin are both remedy and weapon the these caricatures as they make manifest the impact of white purposeful and white reverent erasure of black people’s humanness and the ensuing journey for black people to regain their wholeness and humanness through black love of both community and of self.
In Toni Morrison’s novels, black people (particularly black women) wield love as remedy and weapon for the individual and the community as the community wrestles with the living manifestation of what slavery has created. In Morrison, where there is war there is weapon and where there is harm there is remedy. However, for black people, the need for black self-love and black community love didn’t end with the abolition of slavery and the work of James Baldwin attests to this truth. All of his writing, creative and otherwise, reckons with the struggle of black people for humanness. While the white power structure, created as far back as the U.S’s founding fathers still stretches to and helps support an equally white, equally purposeful erasure of black humanness today, Toni Morrison and James Baldwin bring remedy and weapon to reclaim our humanness. Each of them refuses the narrative of black people as bodies only. Instead their discourse creates a literary landscape where they re-member our dismemberment at the hands of white people through pointing us to black self and community love.
The texts that we will read from Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, spend much time interrogating love as weapon and remedy as it pertains to black people both within and outside of black culture and society. As we examine the map they each give us to navigate the racialized landscape that is the United States, we will wrestle with our own notions of love as remedy and weapon; and by the end of our time together, we will be able to articulate and understand how the “thick love” of Morrison and Baldwin’s “conscious love” when truly applied, can transform individuals and communities.
Class Particulars:
Cost - $100 if paid in full before the first class, otherwise $25 per session for a total of $125 Click here to pay.
Length – Five 2-hour sessions (Choose between Tuesdays 2 – 4 pm or Thursdays 6 – 8 pm beginning Tuesday, February 4 or Thursday, February 6, 2020). Each class is limited to the first 10 participants who wither pay in full ($100) or pay for the first class session $25). To reserve your spot, go to: http://www.denisemiller.studio/store/c9/Community_Courses.html
Texts:
A Mercy and Beloved by Toni Morrison
Fire Next Time and a few other choice essays by James Baldwin
The contemporary ancestor-writers Toni Morrison and James Baldwin’s fiction and non-fiction act as response to the rhetorical questioning of formerly enslaved ancestors such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth and serve as the human portraiture to the caricature creation of black people by white people throughout American history. Morrison and Baldwin are both remedy and weapon the these caricatures as they make manifest the impact of white purposeful and white reverent erasure of black people’s humanness and the ensuing journey for black people to regain their wholeness and humanness through black love of both community and of self.
In Toni Morrison’s novels, black people (particularly black women) wield love as remedy and weapon for the individual and the community as the community wrestles with the living manifestation of what slavery has created. In Morrison, where there is war there is weapon and where there is harm there is remedy. However, for black people, the need for black self-love and black community love didn’t end with the abolition of slavery and the work of James Baldwin attests to this truth. All of his writing, creative and otherwise, reckons with the struggle of black people for humanness. While the white power structure, created as far back as the U.S’s founding fathers still stretches to and helps support an equally white, equally purposeful erasure of black humanness today, Toni Morrison and James Baldwin bring remedy and weapon to reclaim our humanness. Each of them refuses the narrative of black people as bodies only. Instead their discourse creates a literary landscape where they re-member our dismemberment at the hands of white people through pointing us to black self and community love.
The texts that we will read from Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, spend much time interrogating love as weapon and remedy as it pertains to black people both within and outside of black culture and society. As we examine the map they each give us to navigate the racialized landscape that is the United States, we will wrestle with our own notions of love as remedy and weapon; and by the end of our time together, we will be able to articulate and understand how the “thick love” of Morrison and Baldwin’s “conscious love” when truly applied, can transform individuals and communities.
Class Particulars:
Cost - $100 if paid in full before the first class, otherwise $25 per session for a total of $125 Click here to pay.
Length – Five 2-hour sessions (Choose between Tuesdays 2 – 4 pm or Thursdays 6 – 8 pm beginning Tuesday, February 4 or Thursday, February 6, 2020). Each class is limited to the first 10 participants who wither pay in full ($100) or pay for the first class session $25). To reserve your spot, go to: http://www.denisemiller.studio/store/c9/Community_Courses.html
Texts:
A Mercy and Beloved by Toni Morrison
Fire Next Time and a few other choice essays by James Baldwin