The seminar will center on three major African-American female writers: Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as the Nigerian-American writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. We will deal with issues stemming from their dual marginality – as women writing in a male-dominated culture, and as black women writing in a white culture. We will try to describe the ways their poetic and thematic choices are shaped or influenced by their dual marginality. We will deal with their choices of genre, heroine, language and so on as a reflection of their special status, and inquire whether they should be labeled as "African-American". We will also try to probe into the relations between these two types of minority or marginality.