These Are The Breaks? Rethinking Black Performance in the 20th Century

In this course students will look critically at cabaret, documentary film, theatre, dance, popular music, and museum exhibitions, rethinking the ways that Black performances have been configured in debates about American identity in the 20th Century. Rather than try to understand Black performance, and performers, in reductive aesthetic and political frameworks, students will read and write about them as heterogeneous and complex. Enrollment limited to 17 first year students and sophomores.