Ethnographic Playwriting: Stories from the African Diaspora

ENGL

353

Ethnographic Playwriting: Stories from the African Diaspora

Ethnography is a methodology that refers to the study of an individual or a community’s customs and cultures. Through conducting ethnographic studies, we can encounter our own communities in new ways and come into contact with communities outside of our own. Such study and experi-ence is essential to playwriting as a method to document, critique, and challenge the world in which we live. Through literary review, interview-based ethnographic fieldwork in the African Di-aspora, and dramatic writing workshops, this course will help students find ways to enter or en-gage a community, document their individual lives, and document their communities in ethno-graphic plays. In this course, students will read research-based poetry, drama, fiction, and essays by and about people of African descent in the Diaspora. Students will learn ethnographic re-search methods and conduct interviews with members of a locally based Diaspora community and write plays based on these interviews. The course will use diverse methods of instruction, includ-ing lecture, in-class and online discussion, and group work.

All Terms

Undergraduate

Yes

019528