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Blackness is a wide-ranging conversation, a highly debated idea in culture and in scholarship. This course introduces students to a survey of academic concerns surrounding Blackness in literature and various interpretive fields. Students will follow three major thinkers, W.E.B. Du Bois, Hortense Spillers, and Frantz Fanon, and their theories of Blackness as consciousness, as text, and as surface. In addition, students will apply their approaches to two novels by Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison. By investigating how Blackness gets written and conceived as a concept in critical writing and fiction, students will develop a more robust understanding of race and how to apply it in academic discourse. In addition, this class introduces students to reading theory and peer-reviewed writing, where they will learn how to break down arguments and identify lines of inquiry.