Race in the Visual Field: James Baldwin, America, and the Moving Image

Catalog description

Raoul Peck’s 2016 film, I Am Not Your Negro, brings together the work of James Baldwin with an archive of American cinematic and photographic traces. The film proposes that America is deeply if not completely structured by the figure Baldwin refers to as “the negro,” and that this figure is predicated on both a relation of possessive, colonizing belonging, and a defensive and projective psychic mechanism that has made itself visible repeatedly on the silver screen in the United States at least since the 1930s. By stacking film clip upon film clip, photograph upon photograph, Peck underscores Baldwin’s words by showing how deeply visual the relation of “my negro” is, and that that visuality takes both cinematic and psychic form. This relationship—of race in the visual field—is the subject of this course. This class will be an extensive close reading of the film I Am Not Your Negro, using it as primary archive. We will examine the ethical dimensions of appearing in the visual field, as well as complexities of what it means to take up a position from which we witness, behold, project, or otherwise participate as a viewer of that field. Weekly film screenings are integrated into class meetings; thus, the four-hour timeframe. Course materials include: the work of James Baldwin; Avedon and Baldwin, Nothing Personal; Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection; Frantz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness”; Kara Keeling, “‘In the Interval’: Franz Fanon and the ‘problems’ of visual representation"; Diana Fuss, Identification Papers; the films Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1927), King Kong (1933), The Defiant Ones (1958), Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), and Elephant (2003).