ARTH 6511

Blackness Against Representation

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2025-2026 Catalog.

This interdisciplinary seminar explores the conceptual challenge that racial blackness poses for representation. We will 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 blackness positioned in relation to this alleged commonality? How do desires for black representation in these domains shore up or disavow this history? We will engage these questions by considering racial blackness as a problem for representation and this perspective will guide our textual survey of critical theorization of representation in various senses. Throughout the course, we will also examine black art that has experimented with the terms of representation through sculpture, installation, new media, conceptualism, film, and photography.

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