Blackness and Visual Culture

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Will examine the challenge that theories of black visual culture pose to performance theory. Even within a postructuralist context in which all identity categories are constructed, performance theorists such as Judith Butler, Richard Schechner, and Joseph Roach suggest that discrete acts of authorship participate in reinforcing individual identity. Performance theory also suggests that individual acts emerge in relationship to historical strictures that encourage normative manifestations of identity. In other words, the appearance of normative identities follows a progressive history. While individual acts and progressive histories function as the tributaries that feed normative identities, blackness often appears contrary to the individual act or historical evidence. This class will place classic theories of black visual culture and identity (double consciousness, Frantz Fanon's description of black ontology, primitivism) in conversation with key texts from performance theory to articulate how blackness redirects the temporality of performance.