The Black Outdoors

Catalog description

What are the racialized and gendered politics of the outdoors? How does the concept of the Black outdoors challenge dominant narratives of nature, freedom, and belonging? What forms of Black cultural production have emerged from social life lived underground, under siege, and in flight? And how might Black artistic or cultural practices help us rethink what it means to be outside? This course explores the multiple dimensions of the Black outdoors — as theory, practice, poetics, and survival. We will examine how Black life has been shaped by, and has shaped, the outdoors and the environment more broadly — from the fields of the plantation to the vastness of outer space, from the breathless garrett to the open breeze, from the underwater afterlives of the Middle Passage to the speculative geographies of Black futures.