Black Love: Slavery and Sexuality on Screen

Catalog description

Is love a luxury in the time of racial terror? Does war render romance obsolete or out-of-touch? This course explores the worth, role, and work of love in the afterlives of slavery through attention to its tele-visual and cinematic presences. Together, we will look for narrative forms and aesthetic gestures that–rather than simply pointing us back to the antebellum period or evidencing its contemporary vestiges–unconceal racial slavery’s sexual and romantic present. We question the role of screen cultures in popular knowledge-production around African diasporic enslavement and trouble common sense notions of sexual pleasure and intimacy as they pertain to histories of racial representation and repression. Through critical cultural analysis, concept-tracing, and ideology critique, this course deploys blackness as a framework and mode of enfleshed existence by which to assess modern experiences of the erotic insofar as love remains a site