Digital Blackness

Catalog description

#BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, #ICantBreathe, #IfIDieInPoliceCustody, #BlackOutDay are just some of the many hashtags that Black people have created and use on social media to protest police brutality and proclaim their full humanity within the context of Blackness. Over the past three decades, Black people have created and utilized social media, along other digital platforms, media, and tools to reconfigure the terms and terrain of debates and discussions on what it means to be Black in the United States and the larger world. This course is an interdisciplinary investigation into the relationship between historical and contemporary cultural, social and political expressions of Blackness and what might be called the "Digital," the use of computers and computerized technologies, including the internet, to construct the world around us. More specifically, lectures, readings, and class discussions will help students deconstruct the cultural, political economy, and social construction of Blackness in the Digital in an effort to uncover the ways that race more broadly and Blackness more narrowly influences and shapes Black people's present social status and struggles for social justice. Accordingly, the course fosters a critical understanding of Blackness within the "Digital" and provides students with theoretical and practical apparatuses to analyze and develop new constructions of race and freedom using technology.