Black Aesthetics

Exploration of how the aesthetic, social, cultural, political, and philosophical meanings of Blackness and its representation in a global context have to come define visual and performing arts of the Black world from 19th century to present. Use of lectures, visual analysis, and case studies that combine art history, Black study, feminist study, and queer of color critique. Consideration of how and where Black art and aesthetics have become sites of contestation and platforms for questioning the limits and possibilities of race, gender, sexuality, diaspora, modernity, objecthood, the body, the human, futurity, and the practice of art history itself. Focus on transatlantic figures, artworks, themes, and movements that connect and traverse the Americas, Europe, and Africa. Topics include landscape painting, the built environment, and the memory of slavery; the Black avant-gardes; the influence of Black aesthetics in European and African modernisms; and the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in global art histories.

P/NP or letter grading.