Blackness and the Arts

Catalog description

Introduction to the idea of a black art by focusing on a number of different kinds of art practice that enact the idea of race (e.g., film, video, fine art, new media, television, photography, literature). Develop skills in the critical study of black art as a historiographical, cultural, and political craft. Topics are chosen to provide a wide breadth and scope of black visual and expressive culture. The course is interdisciplinary by design and necessity. Encourages a shift of hermeneutics from the black life world to black visual and expressive culture in the terms of blackness. This means repurposing the study of black art in ways other than fidelity to the social category of race and an ethics of positive and negative representation that tacitly encourages the idea of film as cultural policy. Details a commitment to how new paradigms for form and aesthetics, historiography, and intertextuality constitute blackness as the unfinalizable encounter between the idea of race and the idea of art rather than blackness as merely sociology. The approach of this course is primarily that of visual culture and post-structuralist work devoted to difference. In this way, the method is twofold. Firstly, this is an introduction to the idea of race as enacted in the arts and an introduction to critical theory.