Seminar in Interdisciplinary Theory: Radical Black Aesthetics
Tuesdays 2:15-5pm, Hagerty 451
Sam Aranke
The title of this class comes from Fred Moten’s 2008 article The Case of Blackness in which he suggests that black is, does, means, and exceeds the visual field. Taking Moten’s notion of blackness’s social chromatism to work, this graduate seminar explores black cultural theory and its interventions on aesthetic theory. Working primarily out of anticolonial and antiracist politics, the scholars and artists we will examine take skin, color, sound, and touch as their primary mediums in order to further understandings of blackness, antiblackness, and other afterlives of slavery. Some of the scholars we will study include Sylvia Wynter, Édouard Glissant, Frantz Fanon, Hortense Spillers, Huey Copeland, Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman and Katherine McKittrick. We will ask ourselves: what constitutes blackness? What is the art-historicity of black aesthetics? What radicality exists within and despite of the ongoing violence of antiblackness? These questions might lead us to further theoretical and aesthetic explorations how blackness extends tactile, audible, and imaginary qualities to the visual field.
