ARTH 4510

Blackness, Gender and Representation

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2025-2026 Catalog.

This interdisciplinary seminar explores the conceptual challenge that racial blackness poses for representation, with a particular focus on black women’s aporic positionality. Black feminist art and theory forces us to contend with the limits of representation and forms a throughline to engage dominant practices and theories of representation that frame it variously as a shared commons for politics, aesthetics, and the mind itself. Given histories of slavery and racial violence, how is gendered blackness positioned in relation to this alleged commonality? We will utilize close textual analysis and visual analysis to interrogate the ways that black female artists illuminate, critique, and intervene on hegemonic constructions of blackness, gender, and the human that undergird modern frameworks of representation.

Distribution Requirements (ALC-AS)

Last 4 Terms Offered 2025FA

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