Global Black Media

4.0 credits

In this class we will study black-produced media from North America, Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean – including Afro-Indigenous and Afro-Asian media – mostly from the mid-20th century to the present. We’ll explore how black media makers have used audio, visual, print, and digital forms to shape the ways we think about freedom, identity, community, and society. The materials we examine will largely come from audio media like music, radio, and podcasting; visual forms such as film, photography, and painting; digital media like gaming, online video series, and social media; and print media such as magazines and newspapers. Can we identify a relationship between the mid-20th century West African photography of Seydou Keïta and Childish Gambino’s more recent music videos, despite differences of time and place? Are there links between the influential 1940s and 50s BBC Radio series Caribbean Voices and Selly Thiam’s Afroqueer podcast? This is fundamentally a course about the relationship between blackness and media, studied comparatively across decades, continents, forms, and styles.