South Africa: Apartheid and the Black Cultural Imagination

3 units

This course examines the Black cultural imagination in South Africa through literature, music, visual arts, theatre, film, and critical theory. Rather than privileging a single medium, we treat cultural production as a set of practices – literary, visual, critical, etc. – through which South Africans have confronted colonialism, apartheid, and the political complexities of post-apartheid life. Anchored in cultural studies and Black Studies frameworks, the course asks: how do Black South Africans imagine freedom, selfhood, and futurity across different media? How does their imagination resonate with and diverge from global Black diasporic thought?