Writing and Voice: Anthropological Telling through Literature and Practices of Expression

In this graduate seminar we will explore how writers draw from their worlds of experience to create humanistic works of broad 'and often urgent' appeal. We will pay special attention to how creative writers integrate details of history, kinship, community, identity, pain and imagined possibilities for justice with stories that carry the potential to far exceed the bounds of a particular cultural or geographical place. Our focus will be on how writers combine the personal with larger pressing issues of our times that invite us to breakout of the cloistered spaces of academia (a responsibility, a necessity and also an opportunity) to write for larger publics. We will read and take writing prompts from authors who explore themes akin to those we care about as anthropologists to limn connections between ethnographic telling and literary sensibilities. All of the texts and writing exercises will invite students to intellectually collaborate with writers on the ways they clarify, magnify or explode understandings of power, race, colonial trauma, uncertain futures and societal afflictions as well as how individuals and communities expose and remake the constraints that the modern world has bequeathed us. We will engage works across genres. Potential authors include Lucile Clifton, Natalie Diaz, David Diop, Ralph Ellison, Laleh Khadivi, Moshin Hamid, Zora Neale Hurston, Maaza Mengiste, Toni Morrison, Tommy Orange, Zitkala-Sa and Ocean Vuong.