Location: REMOTE via Zoom

Tuesdays 1:00 - 3:00 PM

June 16 - July 14, 2020

Application Deadline: May 31, 2020

* This microseminar will be held remotely and synchronously. If you sign up for the microseminar, you’ll be expected to join each session thru a Zoom link on Tuesdays from 1:00-3:00PM EST.*

*Send all questions about this microseminar to gcws@mit.edu.

What would happen if we re-examined the history of American slavery? And by “re-examine” I mean tear it apart. What threads could we pull about gender, sex and power? This course employs Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, as a lens through which to engage in the current discourses around sexual harassment and assault in the #MeToo movement. Both texts involve navigating spaces of subjugation and patriarchal supremacy though one voice remains steadily outside the mainstream. We will also look at the intersections of race and gender that Incidents reveals and trace how these remain intact or not through today.

 Though Incidents will serve as the primary text through which to read and discuss all other topics another important text will be Danielle McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power.  Finally, the course will conclude with Gayl Jones’s work of fiction, Corregidora, and examine the legacies of sexual trauma. We will also perform cursory secondary readings on the current commentary on #MeToo. These primary and secondary readings are paired so as to read the contemporary with the past in real time.

Faculty

Dr. Linda Chavers is the Allston Burr Resident Dean of Winthrop House and Assistant Dean of Harvard College and a Lecturer in the department of African and African American Studies at Harvard. She completed her PhD in African American Studies with a focus on literature in 2013 from Harvard University. She specializes in 20th and 21st century fiction and the written narratives of enslaved black women. Her dissertation examines interracial themes in the literature of Richard Wright and William Faulkner. She writes essays and memoir for various publications such as Gawker, Dame, Elle, The Offing and Rumpus.