Black Form

This course interrogates form in black literary, filmic, and musical traditions to ask who and what is included and interdicted from proper form; what occurs in the realm of formless frequencies, formal break, and disturbance; and what form reveals about black material realities. Form, for this course, will take on a broad definition as an epistemic and semantic ordering, structuring, patterning, arranging, or shaping. With this capacious definition, we will consider what form elucidates about our world’s assumptive and overdetermined antiblack logic, and how black literature responds to and disrupts this imposition. Through post-1920s, geographically unbound, black authored novels, film, and music, we will consider form and its limits. Our readings will include a broad list of thinkers and writers, including but not limited to, Toni Morrison, Fran Ross, Marie Ndiaye, Akwaeke Emezi, Jean Toomer, Frankétienne, and Harold Sonny Ladoo.