Black Sounds, Black Sights: Reading Black Life

Catalog description

Black cultural production surrounds us, impacting us through a variety of mediums ranging across visual, sonic, and sensory registers. All of it combines to create the rich [and unfinished] tapestry we understand as Blackness. Each class meeting will focus attention on a small corpus of cultural artifacts. Our collective goal will be to engage with this inclusive and volatile body of texts, emphasizing acts of close reading and listening, nuanced forms of visual interpretation, in order to ponder the question: how does Blackness mean? Authors, artists, and musicians to be studied will include (but not be limited to) Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Spike Lee, Billie Holliday, Kara Walker, Langston Hughes, Gordon Parks, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Stevie Wonder, Toni Morrison, Carrie Mae Weems, and Frederick Douglass. Students will also be invited to propose cultural artifacts to be considered as part of our interpretive practice during the week.