What can stories by and about the so-called “game changers” of America’s history of race relations teach us about how to change the world today? What are the various kinds of difficulties that one can expect to encounter in attempting to make the world a better place to live in, and how does the structure of a work of literature complement and supplement those real-life encounters with conflict, revelation, and turning points? How can a revolutionary’s life story—real or even fictionalized—serve as a blue print for a reader’s action in the real world? These are some of the questions that we will attempt to answer as we analyze the following readings during the course of the term: James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain, Malcom X’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Audre Lorde’s Zami, Angela Davis’s An Autobiography, Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw, songs by Janelle Monae, and several of the writings from the anthology titled This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color.
