Reading Groups

Writing Black, Writing Back, Writing Beyond with Joanna Davis-McElligatt

4 Sessions Wednesdays, 7:00 pm EDT - 8:30 pm EDT April 9 to June 11, 2025

Online via Zoom

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The ‘With Books’ option includes the titles required for this group at an additional 10% discount from our Bookstore.

Meeting Dates:
4/9, 4/30, 5/21, 6/11
Online via Zoom

Scholars of the U.S. South are often quick to contend that contemporary Black writers are necessarily responding to William Faulkner—an author frequently lauded as the singularly most important novelist to ever imagine the South. In service of this claim, they point to the way Black authors have embraced his experimental prose, Southern milieu, attention to the complex racial dynamics of region and nation, and his awareness of the complicated spatial politics of home (and away). But to what extent – if any – is this true? How have Black writers actually responded (or ignored) Faulkner’s vision of the South? Are Black writers working in Faulkner’s wake – or are they writing back (or beyond) his perception of the Mississippi world?

In this class we will begin with three Black women who write the South on their own terms—Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Jesmyn Ward. We’ll first explore how these writers construct homeplace, belonging, and desire, how they imagine Black resistance and liberation, and how they confront the treachery and violence of enslavement for Black folk in general, and for Black women, in particular. We will read Faulkner last in order to examine how (or if) Morrison, Butler, and Ward are in dialogue with his vision of the South – and determine for ourselves how (or to what extent) these Black artists respond to Absalom, Absalom! by writing with, back or beyond him. This course will offer students an exploration of key theories in Black Studies and Southern Studies, and help us make sense of how these authors imagine the afterlife of slavery, fabulate and manipulate history (and reality), and imagine the Southern world as otherwise than it is.”

What to read in advance of the first meeting: All participants should have completed Toni Morrison’s Beloved on the first day of class. We will read one novel in its entirety each month

What to expect from this reading group: This course is a combination of structured lectures designed to contextualize and theorize each novel, and participant-driven and -guided discussions.

Reading List:

Beloved by Toni Morrison
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
Kindred by Octavia Butler
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

Capacity: 20

Please note: All virtual classes are recorded. Please click here for information about our recording policy.

Led by

Joanna Davis-McElligatt

Joanna Davis-McElligatt

Joanna Davis-McElligatt is an Assistant Professor of Black Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of North Texas, and Affiliate Faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies, and LGBTQ+ Studies. She is at work on her first monograph, entitled Black Aliens: Narrative Spacetime in the Cosmic Diaspora (The Ohio State University Press, under contract).

She is the co-editor of five volumes: Narratives of Marginalized Identities in Higher Education: Inside and Outside the Academy (Routledge 2019), Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat (UP of Mississippi 2022), BOOM! SPLAT! Comics and Violence (UP of Mississippi 2024), bell hooks’ Radical Pedagogy: New Visions of Feminism, Justice, Love, and Resistance in the Classroom (Bloomsbury, under contract) and Afrosouthernfuturism (in progress). Her recent work can be found in Mississippi Quarterly, south: a scholarly journal, The New William Faulkner Studies (Cambridge UP), and A History of the Literature of the US South (Cambridge UP), among many other places.

Her areas of teaching and research include Africana Studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Literary Theory, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Comics Studies, Southern Studies, and 20th and 21st century U.S. Literary Studies. She is currently serving as the Immediate Past President of the Comics Studies Society.

About this series

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