In “ENG 32B: The Black Transnational Romance,” students will have the opportunity to read and discuss titles like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Americanah” (2013) and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me” (2015), among others. The one-time only course, new for fall 2015, will explore black diaspora fiction from the 20th and 21st centuries. Graduate student and all-but-doctorate PhD candidate Gina Pugliese will conduct the course this semester. Pugliese received special permission from the University to teach the course and share what she has learned over the course of her own research. 

Pugliese elaborated on some of the course’s goals and subject matter in an interview over email with justArts, transcribed below.

justArts: What sparked your initial interest in literature and black diaspora fiction?

Gina Pugliese: There isn’t one particular moment, event or book that is responsible for my interest in literature and black diaspora fiction. My interests grew over time as I continued to read and think about aesthetics, politics, race and culture and as I have had the chance to work with incredibly intelligent and enthusiastic people in the field. 

As an undergraduate, I never planned on or anticipated becoming an English major, but when I was finally forced to declare my major I realized that most of the classes I had taken were English classes. 

I inadvertently gravitated towards a subject matter that enraptured me and found a methodology for analyzing it that made sense to me. When I began my graduate studies I had the opportunity to spend more time thinking deeply about the ideas that so engaged me as a younger student—ideas that necessitate the time and resources to do deep thinking. 

Some of these ideas and questions, which will be taken up in the class I’m teaching, include: how notions of race, gender and sexuality intersect, are socially constructed and perceived throughout the 20th and 21st centuries and how they affect narrative form. What does “diaspora” really mean if people in the black diaspora don’t share a distinct homeland and culture? 

What truly unites a community and informs one’s sense of identity within that community? How are ideas about nationalism, culture and ethnicity defended and repudiated in black diaspora fictions? 

What does freedom mean and how is it imagined in the post-slavery, postcolonial world? What kinds of desires for thriving black life and community are articulated in these fictions despite enduring racist ideologies that make it difficult to imagine a future that doesn’t reproduce the past? 

JA: What inspired you to create this course, and why did you feel that its subject matter in particular was important?

GP: Currently I am writing my dissertation on the 20th-century black transnational romance. I don’t want to only lecture about the ideas I’ve been developing in my project, though. 

I’m looking forward to learning from my students, finding out what draws their attention and interests, what critical questions they want to pose and develop and to expand my own research and understandings of the subject as a result.   

I think the general topics of this course—race, gender and the black diaspora—are important to any of us who think about how ideas of global modernity emerged and developed. Who and what is considered modern and why? How has the spread of global capitalism affected people’s lives and their sense of self and community? 

Who is included in prevailing understandings of the making of civilizations, nations, citizens, cultures and intellectual history? 

How do our understandings of these things change if we consider how persistent worldviews about racial difference have greatly influenced our ability to make sense of the world around us? 

The subject matter of this course also couldn’t be more relevant at this historical moment. 

In this country we’ve had a distressingly eventful summer of police brutality against black men and women that continues to fuel ubiquitous protest and anger. 

These events and the responses to them make it nearly impossible to ignore the fear and vulnerability afflicting those whose bodies are legibly “black.” 

We have also seen a flourishing of black cultural production in response to recent and highly publicized injustices including Janelle Monae’s protest song “Hell You Talmbout” and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book Between the World and Me (which we will read in my course). 

Recent works that don’t directly reference or pre-date Trayvon Martin’s death and the protests that sprung up in response to the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO—Claudia Rankine’s book-length poetic meditation on race, Citizen, and Kehinde Wiley’s portraits of contemporary black people, which were on exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum this past year, come to mind—also forcefully affirm the value of black lives and address the way black subjects, communities and families are perceived and portrayed in our current culture.

 Understandings about race, aesthetics and politics of course exceed national boundaries too, and this course doesn’t just focus on African Americans and black people who find themselves in the U.S. 

We will also think about the mobility of black bodies, moving through and across various national boundaries, perceiving themselves and their communities differently depending on their geographical, social and historical positions.

JA: Do you have a favourite topic that the course covers?

GP: While the class advertises the idea of “romance” in its title, the books I’ve chosen have less to do with love affairs and erotica (although these elements are indeed present) and more to do with the concept of futurity—the question of how the future of black community or diaspora is desired and imagined. 

I’m very interested in the various ways the novels we read desire a world that is not yet here, a world that is rid of what W.E.B. Du Bois called “the problem of the color line” or what we might think about as the material effects that the belief in racial difference has in the world.

JA: How does the course compare to other english courses that you’ve taught in the past?

GP: This will be the first veritable literature class I teach. In the past I’ve taught 3 sections of UWS, but the structure and scope of those courses, focused primarily on learning and practicing university-level writing, critical thinking and reading, are very different from an English class, which offers students the chance to practice literary analysis while also diving more deeply into the content of the course.

JA:  How do you feel your course’s subject matter interacts with the other English courses offered this semester?

GP: I think my class offers an important examination of global black literature. 

While we have courses being offered about African American and Southern literature that meditate on issues of race and gender in the U.S., and while we have classes that examine global literatures influenced by colonial histories (all very interesting and important classes, I might add!), my course is interested in thinking about the intersections of African American and postcolonial studies as we try to make sense of who or what is imagined as united in the black diaspora, why such unification and global community remains important to imagine, and how the attempt to articulate such a diaspora influences narrative form.

JA: Do you have a favorite piece of literature? If so, what is it?

GP: This is a hard question to answer! I deeply love all of the novels that I am teaching in this course but perhaps my favorite is Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom. 

In general, I am fascinated by McKay’s poetry and prose—fiction and nonfiction. 

Recently an unknown manuscript of one of McKay’s unpublished novels was discovered in the archives of Columbia University—it is a satirical portrait of life in Harlem before World War II, and I can’t wait until it is published so I can read it!

JA: What do you hope your students will take away from the course?

GP: A keen desire to read more books in this genre of literature.