Performing Blackness: Critical Acts

This course approaches the study of race and performance through the fields of Africana Studies and Performance Studies to investigate how and why human beings endow bodies with social meaning. It resists biological determinist narratives about race, and instead approaches the study of Blackness as embodied cultural practice transmitted from generation to generation. Course materials will encourage students to consider why “blackness” persists as an organizing force in human societies, and how Black performance as an object, method, and/or analytic reveals how people make, break, and transform the world.