LIT 499-04 Picturing Blackness
Class meetings: Monday and Thursday 2:00-3:20pm
Professor: Cassandra Jackson
This course will examine literature by African-American writers and visual images (historical photographs and contemporary art) that depict African-Americans. Our focus will be on the representation of African-American experience and identity from the period of slavery until the contemporary period. Reading literature and images as texts, we will consider the ways in which visual and literary art illuminate and in some cases speak to each other. This course is intended to be exploratory, an opportunity to stretch the boundaries of disciplines in order to experience African-American artistic expression in light of broad historical, cultural, political, and aesthetic issues.