This course will explore the essays, poetry, theater, music, films, and other experiments of black female artists. Students will be encouraged to analyze these works in their writings, to study the relationship of parts to whole in these works, and to respond to these works with a creative final project of their own, with a sense of how they relate parts to whole in their own work. We will commute between classics by Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou, Lorraine Hansberry, Nina Simone and newer, more experimental, works.