ENG 141 - Literature of Prejudice and Discrimination in the United States

Semester Hours: 4

This course will explore events and ideologies of discrimination and prejudice in American history through the narrative spaces of literature. Through the lens of critical race theory, we will study America’s less talked about history of scapegoating immigrants and marginalized groups. We will study historical events and policies such as Indian Removal, Slavery, the Chinese Exclusion Act, Jim Crow, Japanese Internment Camps, the AIDS crisis, Native American Boarding Schools, and the Black Lives Matter Movement. Through literature written about these historical events, we study the cultural and political struggle between “master narratives” of history promoted by hegemonic discourses, and counternarratives-historically silenced or underprivileged stories that change the way we remember the past-which emerge in response. Since history is typically written by the colonizer-or the group in power-to create, maintain, and justify the dominant hierarchy, we will study literary counternarratives as a tool for exposing, analyzing, and challenging stories of privilege and the dominant discourse on race, poverty, gender, ethnicity, sex, and sexuality.

Intellectual Perspective: HC