32113

SoSe 22: Black Aesthetics: Sensibility, Culture, and the Reality of Race

Michael Thomas

Kommentar

This course explores Black Aesthetics as a theoretical, critical, and artistic practice of constructing and maintaining black life worlds. This focus the on Black Aesthetics as a practice is meant to emphasize that our engagement with the the study of black thought, expressive objects, and history is simultaneously an intervention in our modes of engagement with communities of black people and their boundaries. Thus, "aesthetics" takes on the wide meaning of an examination of the forms of sensibility at work in our perception and judgement, the cultural practices that generate these forms of sensibility, and the racialized socio-political structures that generate these practices and forms of perception in our reality. We will begin our exploration with a discussion of the methods of Black Studies and Black Aesthetics with an emphasis on how we ought approach work by black thinkers in conditions of anti-blackness. Our second phase will develop and critique an aesthetic theory of race constructed by placing the work of W.E.B Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Audre Lorde in conversation with contemporary readings from philosophy, religious studies, cultural studies, critical race theory, sociology, political theory, and literary theory. Our topics will include the status of race as a concept, racialization as an aesthetic project, Post-racial sensibility and the problem of Recognition, and Intersectionality as a politics of experience. We will conclude the course by testing and refining our theory through a series of discussions on topics that we will select as a class. Potential topics include: "Memorialization and the Politics of Mourning," "Violence and the Racialization of Space," "Racial Temporalities," "Afro-Futurism, Afro-Surrealism and Freedom Dreaming," "Blues Legacies and Blues Women," "Hip-Hop Testimony as Subjugated Knowledge," "Black Power and Black Arts," "#BlackLivesMatter," "Afro-Pessimism and Anti-Blackness," and "Black Feminist Affect(s). Schließen