Topics in African-American Studies (380-0-21)

Topic

Screening Blackness: On Race, Sexuality, and the M

Instructors

Mark Lockwood

Meeting Info

Kresge Cent. Hall 2-380 Kaplan: Mon, Wed 9:30AM - 10:50AM

Overview of class

This course explores how film, television, and digital media have represented and reimagined Black life through the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. From early cinema's racist caricatures to the radical work of Black queer filmmakers, we will analyze how visual culture shapes the terms of representation. This course will look at both mainstream and independent works, with particular attention to how Black cultural producers create alternative practices of looking, feeling, and desiring on screen. Drawing on Black studies, queer studies, and film and media studies, students will engage in a range of texts - such as Hollywood features, experimental shorts, documentary, adult film - to ask: What does it mean to be seen as Black? How do moving images take up pleasure, racial fictions, and resistance? And how does screening Blackness open new possibilities for thinking about identity, community, joy, pain, and freedom?

Learning Objectives

Analyze representations of Blackness in film, television, and digital media through the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class.

Identify and historicize key moments in the development of Black visual culture.

Apply key concepts and theories from Black studies, queer studies, and film & media studies to close readings of moving images.

Evaluate the politics of representation, authorship, and spectatorship with attention to how Black creators and audiences resist and transform dominant narratives.

Develop clear, persuasive arguments in written and oral form that connect media history to the broader scope of race, gender, sexuality, and class.