Black Visual & Performance Arts in Latin America & the Caribbean

Catalog description

This course offers an interdisciplinary study of Black visual and performance arts in Latin America and the Caribbean, examining these creative practices as critical sites of knowledge production, identity formation, social resistance, and diasporic worldmaking. Centering Afro-Latin American and Afro-Caribbean artists and performance practitioners, students will investigate how visual and embodied practices confront coloniality, articulate and dismantle constructions of race and gender, interrogate experiences of migration and memory, and envision speculative and liberatory futures. Course materials include painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, sculpture, installation, performance, and new media practices from across the Caribbean, Latin America, and diasporic communities in the United States and Europe. These works are studied in conversation with art criticism, aesthetic theory, and critical frameworks that illuminate the epistemological dimensions of Afro-diasporic creative expression. Bringing together historical and theoretical frameworks on slavery, colonialism, creolization, global Afro-diasporic circulation, and performance as epistemology, the course pairs conceptual grounding with in-depth case studies of key historical and contemporary artists.