Modern African American Film: History and Resistance

Catalog description

This course explores the historical and contemporary impact of resistance on and in African American film during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will consider how filmmakers use narrative and aesthetics to represent, address, and combat anti-blackness, attend to filmmaking itself as a potential act of resistance, and cultivate our own "oppositional gazes" as spectators and critics. The five films we will watch are: · Within Our Gates (dir. Oscar Micheaux, 1920) · Do the Right Thing (dir. Spike Lee, 1989) · Daughters of the Dust (dir. Julie Dash, 1993) · The Watermelon Woman (dir. Cheryl Dunye, 1996) · Moonlight (dir. Barry Jenkins, 2016) Access to the films and any supplemental readings will be provided; unless otherwise stated on the syllabus, students will be expected to carefully study this material prior to each class. Though there will be brief lectures contextualizing each film's production and reception history, the majority of our meeting times will be spent on student-led discussion. Assignments include weekly written responses, a final project, and classroom participation. Because of the nature of the course topic and the content of the films, participation requires extended engagement with fictional depictions of issues including, but not limited to, lynching, sexual violence, police brutality, homophobia, and intraracial antagonism. Students are free to contact me at any point in the term if this becomes an issue.