Encountering African American Literature in the Classroom

Based on several of his publications, Fulbright scholar Matthew Teutsch discussed  with  the Narrative Encounters team how teaching African American  literature  might help students gain a better understanding of the ways  in which  the past has led to the construction of the  current cultural moment in  the US, when racial incidents appear on news  feeds daily. What insights  can students draw from early African  American texts such as David  Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles and Frederick Douglass’s What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?   How did later writers—from Charles Chesnutt and Jean Toomer to Ernest Gaines—expand and complicate these critiques of white   supremacy  by renegotiating what it means to be black in America? How  might  students’ narrative encounters with such texts shed light on the  current  cultural moment? And how might it affect our approach as well  as the  resulting conversations when we teach them not within  the  United States but in a European country such as Austria? These are  some  of the questions we discussed in the workshop.