Blackness and Images
This course is a survey of cultural production of and about Blackness. Looking at the work of artists, filmmakers, and theoreticians, we analyze the relationship between the way Blackness appears or disappears as a racialized category and embodied experience from the late 19th century to today. While the course is focused primarily on the US, we also examine racial formations beyond the US and how cultural workers outside the US have engaged Blackness as a way of seeing, a way of listening, and a process of being.
Students develop critical frameworks for analyzing visual images across multiple media—photography, film, digital memes, monuments, and spatial interventions—while creating their own visual projects that engage with questions of representation, memory, and power. The course examines canonical works alongside contemporary projects like Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter and Garrett Bradley's America, tracing how Black artists have theorized and transformed visual culture.
☞ Key Questions
- How has Blackness been constructed, controlled, and contested through visual representation from the nineteenth century to today?
- What does it mean to look with, through, and against technologies designed for white subjects?
- How do “controlling images” shape and constrain Black life, and how have Black artists resisted and reimagined these constraints?
- What is the relationship between landscape, memory, and racial violence?
- How do digital technologies and meme culture transform Black image-making practices?
- What methodologies emerge when artists create monuments to absence and erasure, and how can visual practices function as public memory and collective healing?
- What futures does decolonial and Black space-time imagining make possible?
☞ Key Themes
- Controlling images and stereotypes (Mammy, Jezebel, Tragic Mulatto, Sapphire)
- The politics of photographic technologies (Shirley cards, skin tone standards)
- Meme-ification and viral Black death
- Black landscape and visual power
- Memory practices and memorialization
- Counter-monuments and public memory
- Digital decolonial practices
- Black space-time and speculative temporalities
Pedagogical Approach
This course treats visual analysis as both critical practice and creative methodology. Students learn to "read" images through close analysis of cinematography, editing, mise-en-scène, and sound, while simultaneously developing their own visual literacy through ongoing image-making in theBilderatlas (picture diary) assignments.
The course emphasizes process over product through iterative assignments—students create visual essays, maintain daily picture diaries, and develop curatorial projects that place their own image-making in dialogue with established artists. Site visits to local landmarks (particularly St. Paul's African American historic sites) connect theoretical frameworks to embodied, place-based learning.
Weekly forum posts create space for students to pursue their own intellectual interests within course themes, while presentation assignments develop skills in researching and communicating about living cultural workers. The course models how observation, documentation, and curation are themselves forms of cultural analysis and memory-keeping.
Bibliography
Film & Video Studies
- Black Audio Film Collective. Handsworth Songs
- Bradley, Garrett. America
- Peck, Raoul. Exterminate All the Brutes (four-part series)
- Corrigan, Timothy and Patricia White. The Film Experience (selections on cinematography, editing, sound, mise-en-scène)
Visual Culture & Photography Theory
- Cole, Teju. “When the Camera was a Weapon of Imperialism (And When It Still Is)” New York Times, 2019
- Roth, Lorna. “The Fade-out of Shirley, a Once-Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive Equity”
- Smith, Shawn Michelle. “Photography, Darkness, and the Underground Railroad: Dawoud Bey'sNight Coming Tenderly, Black” American Quarterly, 2021
- Willis, Deborah and Carla Williams. “Ethnography, Photography, and the Grand Tour” in The Black Female Body: A Photographic History
Black Feminist & Critical Theory
- Gilroy, Paul. Excerpts from The Black Atlantic
- Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. Excerpts from Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Sea Mammals
- Holiday, Harmony. “Black Catatonic Scream”
- McKittrick, Katherine. “Sciences Quarrels Sculpture: The Politics of Reading Sara Baartman”
- Russell, Legacy. Black Meme: A History of the Images That Make Us (multiple chapters)
Visuality & Power
- Mirzoeff, Nicholas. “Oversight: The Ordering of Slavery” and “Visual Addenda” in The Right to Look: A Counter History of Visuality
- Shelby, Karen. “Absence and Presence: Nona Faustine and the Black Body in the National History of the United States” Studies on National Movements, 2022
Documentary & Re-enactment
- Mendes, Ana Cristina. “Documentary re-enactment in Raoul Peck's Exterminate All the Brutes: countering the work of the imperial camera shutter”
- Gillespie, Michael. “Garrett Bradley's ‘America’”
- Bradley, Garrett. “Back to Black: Lime Kiln Club Field Day”
Digital & Decolonial Practices
- Moloi, Nkgopoleng. “Black liberation dreaming: Nolan Oswald Dennis's digital essay game ‘a sun.black’”
- Phillips, Rasheeda. “Counter Clockwise: Unmapping Black Temporalities from Greenwich Mean Timelines”
- Rezaire, Tabita. “Decolonial Healing: In Defense of Spiritual Technologies”
Place & Public Memory
- Saint Paul African American Historic and Cultural Context, 1837–1975 (Parts 1 & 2)
- Pockros, Alana. “She's Putting Herself in Their Places” New York Times, 2024
Artists & Cultural Workers Studied
- Akomfrah, John. My Body is A Monument
- Bey, Dawoud. Night Coming Tenderly, Black
- Dennis, Nolan Oswald. a sun.black
- Faustine, Nona
- Phillips, Rasheeda
- Rezaire, Tabita
- Walker, Kara
Previously taught: Fall 2024, Spring 2022