Black Women's Aesthetic Futures

4 units · Graduate courses (200-299)

Lecture, three hours. Study combines Black women’s art and criticism from the 1970s to today with Afrofuturism and Black feminist theory. Definition, refinement, and application of visual analysis to media that are anchored within and beyond the visual. Through lively and informed discussion, worksheets, and digital research projects, analysis of a range of Black women’s aesthetic practices that span fine art, film, and popular music; social constructions of race, gender, and sexuality; notions of community and belonging; the significance of self-fashioning; the relationship between Black art and Black study; and the speculative imagination as a mode of Black female becoming. Consideration of how these topics come to bear on present-day understandings of the human, the body, and the future. Concurrently scheduled with course C136B. S/U or letter grading.