Black Women, Trauma, and the Art of Resistance

This course explores how Black women have experienced, remembered, and recovered from trauma. Drawing on historical texts, works in psychology, legal records, medical literature, diaries, novels, poetry, plays, songs, and films, we will consider how Black women recorded, passed down, and inherited stories about traumatic events. We begin in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with Black women's experiences on slave ships and during slavery, we discuss intergenerational trauma, and we conclude by examining the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Black women's lives. We pay considerable attention to how Black women relied on the arts to speak the unspeakable. The class will centrally address healing, recovery, and resistance. We will read texts by writers, activists, legal scholars, and artists including Harriet Jacobs, Ida B. Wells, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, bell hooks, Saidiya Hartman, Kimberle Crenshaw, and Jesmyn Ward.