Race and Media

Graduate

Intermittent This course will introduce students to useful methodological approaches to analyze race and representation within a variety of media formats. Media in this course is understood broadly: technologies used to store and deliver information. With this rather broad understanding in mind our course will look at how artists and intellectuals use discrete formats (print, film/video, electronic, and other recording mediums) to imagine, remediate and study the circulation of racialized bodies and identities within global capitalism. We will also think about the concept of race itself as another, particularly problematic "media" format used to store and deliver information about the human for political, economic, ideological and juridical purposes. The class will be organized around specific material and "immaterial" media objects that will allow us to explore the processes of (re)mediation that characterize racialized bodies and formats. We will look at a range of formats from literature and music to film, television, and social media. The course is structured to provide both a chronological and historicist approach to the discourses that define race and media. More than likely, we will watch and (or) read the works of D.W. Griffith, Nella Larson, Melvin Van Peebles, Lizzie Borden, Audre Lorde, Claudia Rankine, Alex Rivera and Nia DaCosta. We will also read the theoretical works of Jacques Ranciere, Huey P. Newton, Dallas Smythe, Lisa Gitelman and Michael Gillespie, Simone Browne, Theodore Adorno, Sara Ahmed and many others.