Communication 417 - AfricanAmericans/US Film&Media

In his definitive book, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, film historian Thomas Bogle critically analyzes a range of racial distortions, caricatures, and demeaning stereotypes that have represented African Americans since the birth of film and television. This course surveys a range of media images of Black people to understand how these portrayals reflect and shape the politics of race and gender in the US. Readings introduce theoretical concepts about race and racial formations as they shape dominant cultural ideologies about identity and difference, and the long Black struggle for civil, political, social, and economic rights. From the enslavement of Africans in the New World to the civil rights movement, from Barack Obama's historic presidency and the promise of a "post-racial" era to spectacular eruptions of white racial grievance in the aftermath of Donald Trump's election in 2016, the course engages key historical shifts to unpack a series of pressing questions: who owns - and controls - media portrayals of Black style, pain, joy? What do Black audiences do with racist representations of themselves? How have Black media makers - from Oscar Micheaux to Spike Lee to Oprah Winfrey to Beyonce - crafted alternative representations of African Americans? What do Get Out, Insecure, and RuPaul's Drag Race tell us about US racial politics today? With particular attention to the intersections of race, class, and gender, this course considers how media representations of Blackness shape - and are shaped by - powerful ideologies of anti-Black prejudice as well as Black struggles for racial solidarity and freedom.

COMM 121 or 140