ENGL 251 - Topics in Black Literatures

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

This course considers Black literatures in all their richness and diversity. The focus changes from year to year, and may include study of a historical period, literary movement, or genre. The course may take a comparative, diasporic approach or may examine a single national or regional literature.

Topic for 2016/17a: Shawn Carter: Autobiography of an Autobiographer. “He rhymed about nothing – the sidewalks, the benches or he’d go in on kids who were standing around him listening.. And then he’d go on about how nice he was, how clean he was.. how all the girls loved him. Then he’d just start rhyming about the rhymes themselves, how good they were, how much better they were than yours, how he was the best that ever did it..” (Decoded, Jay Z)

These words, written in the first few pages of Decoded, are Shawn Carter’s memories of a local rapper from his neighborhood named Slate. Slate and his performances would go on to inspire young Shawn Carter to go home and write himself into a peculiar existence.

Twelve #1 albums later, Jay Z has made his autobiography a global myth that is retold, and revised every year. What makes his narrative, the details of the narrative, the (lack of?) morality in the narrative and the way he tells this narrative(s) so compelling? Is Jay’s story simply the traditional American Autobiography told in rhyme?

This class is more than an exploration into the life and times of Shawn Carter. It’s more than an attempt to etch out the norms of a nation that helped make Jay Z the most accomplished emcee ever. This class is an explorative look at the man and artist in the center of this global cultural cipher. For close to 15 years, Shawn Carter has used autobiography not simply as a mode of communication, but also as a shield and a global, rhetorical and political weapon. Why are we listeners still listening? What are we watching when we Watch the Throne? How does Jay Z go from exploring his life to using the details and sounds of that life as commerce and ammunition? What is relationship between this hyperbolic anxious “I” and this collective “we.” “Do we see similar literary autobiographers using similar narrative techniques? And possibly, most importantly, are there useful rhetorical tools being used by Jay Z that might help us better understand and chronicle the lives we’ve lived? Kiese Laymon.

Two 75-minute periods.