Topics in Black Cinema

(4 Credits)

For Spring 2026: FILM BLACKNESS With a focus on American cinema and the idea of black film, the class considers new paradigms for genre, narrative, aesthetics, culture, historiography, and intertextuality. Centering black film as art and discourse, the class renounces notions of black film as a stable category, genre, merely a reflection of lived experience, or a matter of positive/negative images, authenticity, and essence. With a concentration on “film blackness,” this seminar is an intensive study of the politics and pleasures that constitute the idea of black film. Informed by Film and Media Studies, Visual Culture Studies, American Studies, Performance Studies, and Black Studies scholarship, course topics will include experimental/avant-garde cinema, film noir, blaxploitation, speculative fiction, Black womanist/feminist film, independent cinema, the racial grotesque, hip-hop art cinema, and queer cinema.