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Hum 110 Book Club Syllabus

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Each unit is expected to take approximately one month for each book club to cover. Individual schedules may vary by group.

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Year 1: Ancient Mediterranean 

Completed Summer 2025

Most book clubs launched this unit in September 2024 and completed these units in Summer 2025, but individuals are welcome to revisit these units:

Year One Syllabus

Year 2: Mexico

Completed Summer 2026

Most book clubs launched this unit in September 2025 and completed these units in Summer 2026, but individuals are welcome to revisit these units:

Year Two Syllabus

Year 3: Harlem

Books Needed

  • W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
  • Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage International, 1995).
  • Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: Norton, 2019).
  • Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006).
  • David Levering Lewis, ed., The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader (New York: Penguin, 1995).

These specific editions are suggested, but not required, for alumni participants. Additional assigned texts are available on e-reserves accessible to participating alumni via links embedded in the syllabus below.

Unit I: Propaganda, History and Power / Part One

What is the role of art or education or journalism in political change? How are Blackness and Whiteness understood and constructed by these authors? How do Black activists represent themselves in relation to their material and their audience?

Assignment

  • E.B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” Souls of Black Folk, 189-205 [BOOK]; “Criteria of Negro Art,” Crisis (1926): 290-7; “Negro Art,” Crisis (1921): 55-6; “The Social Origins of American Negro Art,” The Modern Quarterly 3 (1925): 53-6; W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Propaganda of History,” in Black Reconstruction in America (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2013), 635-51.
  • Aida Overton Walker, “Colored Men and Women on the Stage,” The Colored American Magazine 9 (1905): 571-5.
  • Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, in Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900, 2nd ed., ed. Jacqueline Jones Royster (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016), 46-68.

Lectures

  1. Mark Burford, “‘True Life’: Propaganda, Leadership, and the Politics of Black Art.”
  2. Paddy Riley, “Reconstructing History, Reconstructing Freedom.”

Unit II: Propaganda, History and Power / Part Two

What is the role of education in political change? What are the costs? What are the calculations? How are Blackness and Whiteness understood and constructed by these authors? How do Blackness and Whiteness construct each other? How do Black activists represent themselves in relation to their material and their audience?

Assignments

  • Du Bois, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” and “Coming of John,” Souls of Black Folk, Chapters 1 and 13 [BOOK].
  • E.B. Du Bois, “Credo” and “Souls of White Folk,” in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, (New York, Schocken Books, 1969), vii-viii, 3-4, 29-52.
  • Booker T. Washington, “Industrial Education for the Negro,” in The Negro Problem (New York: Pott & Co., 1903).

Lectures

  1. Nathalia King and Tamara Metz, “Souls of Black Folk, Souls of White Folk: Du Bois’ analysis of Race.”
  2. Margot Minardi and Dustin Simpson, “The Pain, Pleasures, and Possibilities of Learning.”

Unit III: Propaganda, History and Power / Part Three

What is the role of music in political change? How is music understood and mobilized by the different authors? What meanings is it given in the different performances? What are the relationships between Black and American that are delineated?

Assignments

Lecture

  1. Mark Burford, “Who, How and Why Not? Questioning African American Spirituals.”

Unit IV: Collectivity and Identities / Saidiya Hartman

How did urban space and migration create the opportunity for new social and political groups to emerge? How did urban space and migration occasion new articulations and visualizations of a national or Pan-African identity? How did urban space reproduce or create new hierarchies and systems of exploitation? How do Hartman’s (or Hartman’s characters) experiments with form articulate their messages?

Assignments

  • Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: Norton, 2019), xiii-xvi, 192-202, 216-256. [BOOK]
  • James Weldon Johnson, “The Making of Harlem,” in Survey Graphic 6 (1925): 635-639.

Lecture

  1. Margot Minardi, “Harlem, New York: City within a City.”

Unit V: Collectivity and Identities / Poetry, Novels and Literary Magazines

How are existing artistic forms used to address contemporary racial dynamics? How do the works of the Harlem Renaissance relate to earlier literary movements or ideas? What is literary modernism? How did writers reconcile the general features of modernism with their particular identities as Black writers in twentieth-century America? How does the form of works of literature, art and music relate to their cultural or political content?

Assignments

  • Selections from The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, ed. Lewis [ALL BOOK]:
    • Countee Cullen, “Yet Do I Marvel” and “Heritage,” 244-247;
    • Claude McKay, “If We Must Die,” “The White House,” and “The Harlem Dancer,” 290-291, 296;
    • Langston Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “The Weary Blues,” “Red Silk Stockings,” “Goodbye, Christ,” “Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria,” 257-267;
    • Sterling Brown, “Southern Road,” “Odyssey of Big Boy,” and “Ma Rainey,” 227-232;
    • James Weldon Johnson, “Creation,” 286-288;
    • Gwendolyn Bennet, “Hatred,” 223;
    • Helene Johnson (all the poems), 276-278.
  • FIRE!!: Devoted to the Young Negro Artist (1926) in Negro Periodicals in the United States (Westport, CT: Negro Universities Press, 1970). Focus on: Richard Bruce Nugent, “Smoke, Lilies And Jade, A Novel, Part I”; Zora Neale Hurston, “Sweat.”
  • [SUBSIDIARY] Sterling Brown, "Our Literary Audience"

Lectures

  1. Jay Dickson, “Flaming Youth.”
  2. Dustin Simpson, “Harlem Renaissance Poetry.”

Unit VI: Collectivity and Identities / Black Internationalism

How does Garvey’s vision compare with that of Du Bois and others? How do the politics of the UNIA compare to the politics of the different poets and novelists from last week—in their relation to race, nation, gender, the past, the future, or in other ways? In what spaces and spatial relations does Garvey locate black identity? Compare Hartman and the Spirituals, as well as the poets and novelists from last week.

Assignments

  • Marcus Garvey, “Africa for the Africans” and “Liberty Hall Emancipation Day Speech,” in The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, ed. Lewis, 17-28 [BOOK]
  • Universal Negro Improvement Association, “Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World” (1920).
  • Alain Locke, “Harlem,” in Survey Graphic 6 (1925): 629-30.

Lecture

  1. Kritish Rajbhandari, “Harlem in the World.”

Unit VII: Collectivity and Identities / Their Eyes Were Watching God

How are existing artistic forms used to address contemporary racial dynamics? How do the works of the Harlem Renaissance relate to earlier literary movements or ideas? What is literary modernism? How did writers reconcile the general features of modernism—and of the novel—with their particular identities as Black writers in twentieth-century America? How does the form of works of literature, art and music relate to their cultural or political content?

Assignments

  • Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God [BOOK]
  • [SUBSIDIARY]
    • Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” in The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, ed. Lewis, 91–95; George S. Schuyler, “The Negro-Art Hokum,” in The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, ed. Lewis, 96–99. [BOOK]
    • Zora Neale Hurston, “What White Publishers Won’t Print,” in I Love Myself When I Am Laughing...And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, ed. Alice Walker (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1979), 169-173.

Lectures

  1. Dustin Simpson, “Defiant Appeals: Schuyler, Hughes and Hurston.” [Note that Dustin identifies a picture of Hughes as Schuyler when he is talking it through, but it is labeled correctly in the slides!]
  2. Kritish Rajbhandari, “From Mules to Men: Animals in Their Eyes were Watching God.”

Unit VIII: Collectivity and Identities / Jacob Lawrence and the Blues

How are existing artistic forms used to address contemporary racial dynamics? How did artists reconcile the general features of modernism with their particular identities as Black artists in twentieth-century America? How does the form of these works of art and music relate to their cultural or political content?

Assignments

  • Listening assignment. The song list is visible if you click on “Hovda Blues Lecture.”: W.C. Handy, “St. Louis Blues”; Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, “St. Louis Blues”; Ida Cox, “Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues,” “Graveyard Dream Blues”; Ma Rainey, “Runaway Blues”; Blind Willie Johnson, “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground”; Blind Willie Johnson, Willie B. Richardson, “The Soul of a Man”; Skip James, “Devil Got My Woman”; Count Basie, “Boogie Woogie Blues”; Sister Rosetta Tharpe, “Strange Things Happening Every Day”; Chuck Berry, “Roll Over Beethoven”; Duke Ellington, "Happy Go Lucky Local." 
  • Jacob Lawrence, Migration Series (1940-1941), Phillips Collection.
  • [SUBSIDIARY]

Lectures

  1. Nathalia King, “Moving the Color Line: Jacob Lawrence’s ‘Migration Series.’”
  2. Paul Hovda, “The Many-Sided Blues.”

Unit IX: Visibility and Invisibility / Invisible Man

How does Invisible Man tell the story of Black experience in the United States? Why does it use the novel form to do so, and how does it use the novel form to do so? How does Invisible Man critique modernity and the modern nation state? What kind of a space does Invisible Man make of Harlem? Or of the South?

Assignment

  • Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man [BOOK]

Lectures

  1. Sonia Sabnis, “Epic Fights and the Black Boxer.”
  2. Kritish Rajbhandari,, “Thinker-Tinker: The Black Technological Self.”
  3. Nigel Nicholson, “Stepping inside of Time.”
  4. Peter Steinberger, “Modernity.”
  5. Ann Delehanty, “Running and Dodging the Forces of History.”

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