Blackness, Gender and Representation

Catalog description

This interdisciplinary seminar explores the problem that blackness poses for representation, with a particular focus on black women’s aporic positionality in this problem. Dominant discourses of representation pose it as a mode of making present what is physically absent through conceptual, aesthetic, and political means—a process and framework that produces a shared form of subjectivity and its attendant commons. Given histories of slavery and racial violence, how does blackness’s excluded but constitutive positionality challenge this alleged commonality? Further, how does black feminist theory’s positing of black women as endlessly productive, hole-like vestibule for modern subjective form problematize representation? We will utilize analysis of black feminist and critical theoretical texts and artworks to interrogate the ways that black women illuminate black gender as a problem for representation.