TEACHING AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE DURING COVID-19

I HAVE BEEN TEACHING African American literature to college students for almost three decades. This year my students in Introduction to African American Literature started the semester in a lecture hall on the campus of Columbia University and ended it scattered to the four corners of the Earth. Some had to quarantine for two weeks after returning to their countries. Others remain in rooms and apartments in New York, an epicenter of the pandemic. Some have lost family members; others have themselves been sickened by the virus. Some turned out to be more comfortable talking on Zoom than in a physical classroom; others find it alienating and prefer instead to reach out through email or on WhatsApp. And still they kept reading, they kept thinking. They showed up, week after week. Teaching them in this pandemic shed new light on the power of learning, community, and this extraordinary literature.

I missed my students terribly. Nonetheless the moment allowed us to work together in a different way. The crisis stopped us in our tracks, but it also provided an opportunity. I decided to slow things down for them. Rather than continuing to read a novel a week, we read an essay and a short story by James Baldwin, one of Toni Morrison’s shorter novels, and, in the semester’s last two weeks, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), a work of speculative fiction that portrays community-building in the midst of economic, social, political, and ecological catastrophe. Ultimately Butler’s novel-in which change and adaptability are major themes-encourages readers to consider what kind of future might be built on the other side of pandemic and the catastrophe of racial injustice that it laid bare. How fitting.

My course changed in other ways as well. I canceled the takehome exam, which would have required students to provide a synthesis of their learning and to place texts in conversation with each other. Instead, I decided to focus on imaginative skills, and asked the students to create a work of art in response to any of the texts we had read. I also gave them a second assignment, to be shared on the last day of class. The description began with a quotation from Arundhati Roy’s essay “The Pandemic as Portal”: