Fashioning the Black Body

Catalog description

The fundamental query underlying this course is what is the relationship between dress, adornment, and corporeal figuring and race, specifically blackness? This course will draw upon a number of disciplines and fields including history, performance theory, cultural studies, gender studies, and queer studies to examine how blackness is fashioned, and refashioned within the United States and globally. Throughout the course we will investigate how not only race--but attendant issues of gender, sexuality and citizenship have all been constructed and contested through dress. Finally, we will explore what new and more nuanced insights might fashion, dress, adornment, and corporeal figuring offer us for understanding black subjectivities more broadly.