AP/HUMA 3300 3.00

Black Canadian Film

This course examines the burgeoning corpus of Black Canadian film to consider the ways in which Black cinematic culture in Canada has developed in the last 40 years and continues to develop today. It addresses a range of genres, including dramatic feature films, documentaries, short and experimental films. Guest speakers including Black Canadian authors will be invited depending on availability in a given year.
Film screenings are supplemented with a study of the growing body of theoretical and critical material that examines these films as texts, and also situates them within the broader contexts of Black Canadian and Black Diasporic cultural production. The course also considers the ways in which Black filmmakers in Canada position themselves in relation to, and interrogate, dominant national narratives and the recurrent tropes of Canadian filmmaking. The films facilitate discussion of various topics and lines of inquiry, including race and racism as they intersect with class, gender, and sexuality; immigration and multicultural discourse in Canada; and the ways in which Black Canadian filmmakers imagine and visually articulate different kinds of communities and collectivities.