This course is designed as an introductory survey of texts and discourses within the African American literary tradition. As we explore critical works within this tradition, from the earliest slavery to the Harlem Renaissance, we will frame our close textual readings and literary analyses within the context of critical movements and discourses in social, cultural, and literary history. We will be particularly engaged in examining the manner in which literary works and other forms of African American cultural production reveal and respond to social and cultural ideologies, especially those that impact constructions of difference and the formation of identity, subjectivity, and/or the notion of the self.