Imaging Blackness: Race and Visual Culture in Africa and the African Diasporas

3 units

This course examines the relationship between race, nation, and visual culture by interrogating the ways in which citizenship in Western nations is racially defined. Through the semester, we will focus specifically on South Africa and African diaspora communities in the U.S., Britain, Canada, Germany, and the Caribbean. People from Africa and the African diaspora have historically been excluded from the national imaginary and have sought other forms of belonging that challenge the limitations of the nation-state. First, this course examines the role of visual culture in reifying the relationship between race and nation. Collectively through readings, film screenings, and by engaging with other visual arts practices (photography and fine art), we will interrogate the following questions: What is the relationship between early cinema and photography and how have these visual technologies contributed to contemporary understandings of race, particularly blackness and Africanness? What is the relationship between early cinema, race, and nation? How has cinema been used by black communities to signal the emergence of modern black life? How does Africa figure in the African diasporic imaginary through visual art? After establishing the long history of the intimate relationship between race, nation, and visual culture we will then interrogate the manner in which artist of the African diaspora and South Africa have employed the visual technologies of cinema and photography to contest dominant representations (stereotypes) of blackness. We will engage with the manner in which these artists have and continue to challenge, critique, and offer new ways to think through the relationship between race, nation, and visual culture. Throughout the course we will examine how other vectors of power like class, gender, and sexuality are central to formations of race and nation. By engaging with contemporary visual artists of South African and the African diaspora we will examine how cultural production, for example, can and does serve as one means through which people imagine their lives, often resisting and revising forms of oppression to create alternative community and cultural formations.