Black Matter(s): Representing Blackness(es) Across Space, Time and Bodies
Readings:
— Selection of Poems by Leopold Sedar Senghor
— Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, Aimé Césaire
— Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon
— I Spit on Your Graves, Vernon Sullivan (Boris Vian)
COURSE DESCRIPTION:
This course will examine critically various strategies deployed by authors and filmmakers to reassign power, beauty and intellectual autonomy to Black bodies. Films, essays and writings from the Francophone (French, Caribbean and African) canon will be put in conversation with American works to tease out global issues of representations.
Together we will explore the thin boundary between objectification/exotization and praise, particularly in the case of feminine depiction; we will interrogate various iterations of violence performed unto and by Black bodies and their signification; and we will ask how non-classic forms of representation (for instance, comedies or horror films) contribute to new ways of conceptualizing race for a broad public.
Additional information:
French R1B fulfills the second half of the Reading and Composition Requirement in the College of Letters and Science. Class conducted in ENGLISH.