Afro-American Studies 693D - S- Black Visual Culture

This course examines genealogies of black visual culture from the age of slavery to the present day. It also offers an introduction to black visual theory. We will consider multiple genealogies, including the visual rhetoric of the abolitionist movement; the role of visuality in regimes of enslavement and its afterlives; black women's friendship albums and other visual ephemera; the data visualizations created by W. E. B. Du Bois and his students at Atlanta University; the use of ekphrastic techniques in black avant-garde prose and poetry; intermedia and radical black aesthetics; black portraiture and other trends and conversations in contemporary art. We will be particularly interested in black feminist, queer, and trans theorizations of the possibilities and pitfalls of visual representation.