PMA 4961

Screening Blackness

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2016-2017.

The seminar "Screening Blackness" provides a theoretical, cultural, and historical focus on "blackness" in film, media, and visual culture. Considering questions of performance, censorship, embodiment, pleasure, and representational politics, we will evaluate how race, particularly Black skin, has been used as a signifier and complex code for various things on screen. In doing so, we will investigate how blackness is contingent on the specifics of its historical, social, and cultural production and, yet, open to multiple and competing claims. Therefore, blackness here is less a stable racial category than theoretical motor, operated by moving and contested discourses, histories, images, meanings, and performances by Black subjects. Focusing on Black skin representation and discourses of blackness as a cultural signifier, students will watch and discuss important representations and misrepresentations of blackness on screen.

When Offered Spring.

Permission Note Enrollment limited to: 15 students. Intended for advanced undergraduates and graduate students.

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