Nov 14, 2024
OHIO University Undergraduate Catalog 2019-20

AAS 2500 - Blackness and the Arts


Introduction to the idea of a black art by focusing on a number of different kinds of art practice that enact the idea of race (e.g., film, video, fine art, new media, television, photography, literature). Develop skills in the critical study of black art as a historiographical, cultural, and political craft. Topics are chosen to provide a wide breadth and scope of black visual and expressive culture. The course is interdisciplinary by design and necessity. Encourages a shift of hermeneutics from the black life world to black visual and expressive culture in the terms of blackness. This means repurposing the study of black art in ways other than fidelity to the social category of race and an ethics of positive and negative representation that tacitly encourages the idea of film as cultural policy. Details a commitment to how new paradigms for form and aesthetics, historiography, and intertextuality constitute blackness as the unfinalizable encounter between the idea of race and the idea of art rather than blackness as merely sociology. The approach of this course is primarily that of visual culture and post-structuralist work devoted to difference. In this way, the method is twofold. Firstly, this is an introduction to the idea of race as enacted in the arts and an introduction to critical theory.

Requisites: Soph or Jr or Sr
Credit Hours: 3
General Education Code: 2HL
Repeat/Retake Information: May be retaken two times excluding withdrawals, but only last course taken counts.
Lecture/Lab Hours: 3.0 lecture
Grades: Eligible Grades: A-F,WP,WF,WN,FN,AU,I
Course Transferability: OTM Course: TMAH Arts & Humanities
College Credit Plus: Level 1
Learning Outcomes:
  • To develop skills in the critical study of black art as a historiographic, cultural, and political craft.
  • To introduce students to critical theory.
  • To introduce students to the idea of race as enacted in the arts.


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