AP/HUMA 4309 3.00

The Body and the Visual

This fourth-year seminar will examine representations of blackness in textual and visual work from the mid-1980s onward. Central to this course is the problematization of the very terms of representation and the visual. We will work to understand how representation works and what is at stake in the repetition of certain visual tropes and refusals to repeat those tropes.

We will read fiction, plays, nonfiction and view visual texts of photography, film, and installation work.

From writings by Gayl Jones, Essex Hemphill, Audre Lorde, Dionne Brand, and John Keene to images and video by Carrie Mae Weems, Glenn Ligon, Sandra Brewster, and Abdi Osman, to thinking through Black Lives Matter and No Selves To Defend this course will trace a line of writing, thinking, seeing, and hearing that is concerned with Black people, Black bodies and how they arrive in the visual and how this matters. We will attend to the ways that 'race' is produced by and produces ways of seeing, hearing, feeling through reading texts, looking at images and film, and listening to music.

How might one apprehend and challenge the present world? How might one imagine new worlds and possible futures through and counter to the visual? In addressing these and other questions, students will regularly interact with visiting artists and scholars whose work and research address these themes.