Black Feminist Visual Thinking against Erasure
This course examines visual methods employed by Black women artists and thinkers as forms of resistance, survival, and world-building. Through critical engagement with photography, film, installation art, and experimental media, students explore how Black feminist visual strategies challenge dominant regimes of representation while imagining otherwise possibilities.
The course traces visual genealogies that refuse the violence of hypervisibility while simultaneously confronting erasure, navigating what Saidiya Hartman calls "the visual field of black captivity and its afterlife." Students analyze works by artists who transform the very grammar of visuality, developing critical frameworks to understand how Black feminist aesthetics rework time, space, and embodiment. Through both analytical and creative projects, students consider how these visual practices serve as methods of theorizing that expand beyond conventional academic boundaries, offering provocations for imagining and enacting more liberatory futures.
☞ Key Questions
- What does it mean to look with a Black and feminist gaze?
- How do we document what has been erased or rendered invisible?
- How can visual practices refuse both hypervisibility and erasure simultaneously?
- What methodologies emerge when artists use biomythography and critical fabulation to fill archival gaps?
- How does experimental documentary function as resistance and world-building?
- What happens when we treat artworks not as objects of study but as intellectual frameworks?
- How can community archiving practices center reciprocity and collective knowledge production?
☞ Key Themes
- The oppositional and forensic gaze
- Counter-archives and survival strategies
- Biomythography and critical fabulation as methodology
- Experimental documentary as resistance
- Personal narrative and the politics of refusal
- Community archiving practices
- The frequency of images and haptic visuality
- Black women's hypervisibility and erasure
Pedagogical Approach
This course centers Black women's visual production as theory, treating artworks not as objects of study but as intellectual frameworks that generate new ways of knowing. Students learn research methodologies—ethnography, oral history, archival work—directly from artists who employ these methods in their practice.
The semester-long Visual Archive assignment develops students' capacity for sustained observation and pattern recognition, while the collaborative final project models community-engaged scholarship that prioritizes reciprocity and collective knowledge production. The course emphasizes making contact with living artists and learning from practitioner-scholars whose work exceeds traditional academic boundaries.
Bibliography
Black Feminist Theory & Method
- Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts”
- hooks, bell. “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators”
- O'Grady, Lorraine. “Olympia's Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity”
- Russell, Legacy. Selections from Glitch Feminism
- Sharpe, Christina. “The Wake” and “The Ship” in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
Visual Theory & Forensics
- Azoulay, Ariella. “Potential History of Photography” (Chapter 1)
- Campt, Tina. A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See
- Weisman, Eyal. Forensic Aesthetics
Film & Documentary Studies
- Mason, Clitha. “Queering The Mammy: New Queer Cinema's Version of an American Institution in Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Woman”
- Richardson, Matt. “Our Stories Have Never Been Told: Preliminary Thoughts on Black Lesbian Cultural Production as Historiography in The Watermelon Woman”
- Sullivan, Laura. “Chasing Fae: The Watermelon Woman and Black Lesbian Possibility”
Additional Theoretical Resources
- Cole, Teju. “When the Camera was a Weapon of Imperialism. (And when it still is)”
- Pauwels, Luc. “Taking and Using Ethical Issues of Photographs for Research Purposes”
Artworks Studied
- Bradley, Garrett. Time (2020)
- Bowen, Deanna. sum of the parts: what can be named (2010)
- Dunye, Cheryl. The Watermelon Woman (1996)
- Friedrich, Su. Damned if you Don't
- Frazier, LaToya Ruby. The Notion of Family
- Jones, Jazmine. Seeking Mavis Beacon (2024)
- Sekula, Allan. The Forgotten Space
Visual Artists Referenced
- Jafa, Arthur
- Lawson, Deana
- Simpson, Lorna
- Weems, Carrie Mae
- Williams, Kandis
Related courses: MCST 294: Blackness and Images (Fall 2024, Spring 2022)