Is It Me or Is it Meme?: Blackness and Memes

This course explores memes as sites of black cultural production. How do we conceptualize a relationship between memes and blackness? How do representations of blackness come to inform the creating and circulation of memes? How do digital interactions complicate notions of collective consciousness, authenticity, ownership and citation? We will ground our exploration of memes in various genealogical and methodological formations of queer of color critique, black studies and cultural studies. The course will investigate aesthetic, affective, imaginative and cultural dimensions of digital black cultures, paying particular attention to questions of relationality (self and collective), circulation and world-making potentialities. We will analyze how race, gender, and sexuality are embedded in the production and proliferation of memes (for example: girl dinner, girlmath, trad wife, i’m just a girl). The course examines frameworks including affectability, visual culture, virality, performance, identity, disidentifications, and blackness.