Black Diasporic Culture

Catalog description

In this seminar students will look at Black cultural forms as they are created, shared, and participated in across national borders. In this process students will interpret the connections of Black culture shared across the diaspora to belonging, power, and practices of collective, and individual social resistance. We will also investigate the relationships that Black communities have with the nations in which they reside in efforts to understand why the transnational exchange becomes socially and politically important. In consideration of the ways in which Black culture takes shape and is shared transnationally the course will ask: What does it mean to think of Black culture as being transnational or diasporic? What are the political investments in the term “Black”? What does “Black culture” hope to explain? In addressing these questions, the seminar will engage transnational theory and discussions of art, politics, gender, sexuality, performance, and belief. The seminar takes a theoretical approach to understanding diasporic Black culture and incorporates case studies to root theory in everyday practice.