Rethinking Black Visuality

As part of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities Black Visualities Initiative, this course will engage practices and theories of black visuality that refuse traditional definitions of visuality that function to refuse blackness itself. Each year, the seminar will focus on a selected genre of visual texts, artistic works, and/or embodied performances and use them to develop an keen understanding of how black artists/thinkers/writers/practitioners articulate the multi-sensory frequencies of black life. Key to our discussions is a rigorous theorization of the complex practices of black refusal and futurity that structure these works.