Reading Black Culture (FYS)

Description

Blackness is the lifeblood of the culture industry. U.S. popular culture--which traverses national boundaries due to the workings of imperialism and global capital--has a predominantly Black face, at the same time that Black people, in the United States and across the globe, are made to live in unrelenting proximity to death and destitution. This introductory course aims to tackle this seemingly contradictory state of things by considering the manifold ways Blackness circulates in the global cultural landscape. With the ultimate aim of increasing cultural literacy, we will engage with key questions such as: What makes a Black text? What, if any, political duty does the Black cultural worker have to the larger "Black community"? How does a critique of capital figure into Black culture? How might we conceptualize intellectual work as central to Black cultural traditions? This course traces these questions through the analytic of "reading"--as a mode of critical engagement that exceeds the textual. We will contend with Blackness in its varying permutations and figurations across the domains of literature, music, film, sport, visual art, and performance. Offering: Crosslisting Grading: A-F Credits: 1.00 Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL Identical With: ENGL112F Prereq: None