This is a reading-intensive course that spans a wide range of Black Atlantic cultures by focusing on the roles of visual arts and performance in the production of historical memory.

In this course we will examine a diversity of Black Atlantic visual cultures, both in Africa and in the Diaspora, with a focus on how historical memory and the experience of the passage of time are articulated in objects and performances. What, for example, are the poetics of trying to reclaim historical “African” origins when such a reconstruction is by definition impossible? The idea of allegory will run strongly through the course: the mourning of lost “ancient” wholeness marked also by the enduring hope that fragments of the past can be reassembled to redeem the present. This is not to say that the people whose lives and works we will discuss here are abjectly “living in the past”—though this very misconception has been rehearsed often in museum exhibitions devoted to the objectifying study of “Other” cultures. We will concentrate on the ways in which the realities of a shifting present are addressed throughout the African Diaspora: in struggle, in celebration, and always in movement. Topics will include the construction of ritual altars in Haiti and Cuba; the carnival arts of Brazil, New Orleans and Trinidad; the sculpting of memory in recycled objects in the American South and in the sonic spaces of hip-hop; and other phenomena.

Course Requirements:

Student performance will be based heavily on weekly reading summaries and participation in classroom discussion. Each student also will be responsible for a class presentation of one week’s readings. A final project will consist of a “performance” that will synthesize the semester’s material in a way unique to each student. This may be in the form of a lecture, a film or video, a website, an interactive sculpture, among other possibilities. This project will also include a written component.

Intended Audience:

The course is intended for advanced students with diverse academic interests: religion, performance studies, anthropology, Atlantic studies. Concentrators in African and African-American studies, music, and History of Art are especially welcome.

Class Format:

3 hours per week, seminar meetings, no GSI involvement.