Clothing and Black Expressive Culture in African American History

Catalog description

This course will examine the long tradition of Black expressive culture through clothing practices. We will specifically focus on the material history of how clothing has been used to refashion and retain Black identities from slavery to the millennial era. To do this we will apply concepts emerging out of Black performance theory and visual culture, history, and cultural studies. African American clothing culture represents a spectrum of Black performance styles and expressive culture that rewrites everyday sartorial practices to reimagine the Black subject. In the course we will examine scholars whose research on Black sartorial practices centers the narratives of marginalized cultural workers that illuminate the archive of images and objects.