AFRCNA 1083 - SPECIAL TOPICS: BLACK LIFE ONSCREEN - AFRICAN AMERICAN CINEMA

Minimum Credits: 3
Maximum Credits: 3
What is a black film? What is its function? In this course we will examine films made by and/or about black Americans over the last one hundred years as we attempt to determine the potential applications of style, narrative trope, and production method that could distinguish these works as a specifically marked and marketed body of cinema. As we approach these films, we will site them for critique of the ways blackness and Americanness are represented in the public imagination. We will address some of the challenges and apparent disparities that float between image culture and economic culture, between aesthetic culture and political culture, as black American writers, directors, and actors variously render resistance to and acquiescence to sometimes restrictive conventions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality. Moving from D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation through to Jordan Peele's Get Out, we will conduct a mostly chronological survey of feature-length films and incorporate a range of critical work that directly and indirectly speaks to the central texts. Through a series of conversations and essay projects we will theorize black film and investigate whether this designation is useful to certain efforts. We will sound out some ideas about what African American cinema indicates with regard to the agency of production and representation for otherwise marginalized people. And we will consider the increasing significance of this discussion in an era of newer technologies and contemporary policy shifts that inform the modes through which varied blacknesses are constructed and commodified on a very big screen.
Academic Career: Undergraduate
Course Component: Lecture
Grade Component: Letter Grade
Course Attributes: African Studies

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