Courses

How does one represent black life, convey its frequencies, its textures and sounds, its opacity, the deep and rich black tones that define the lived experience and the aesthetic territory?  How is one able to feel, to sense, to perceive in the psychic hold of anti-blackness or to render existence at the lower frequencies?  What possibilities might be yielded by the state of the blackness? Since the eighteenth century, black writers and thinkers have addressed the range of utterances and the sonic dimensions part and parcel of the lived experience of dispossession, from the moans and cries of the hold, Aunt Hester’s Scream, the shout as worship and circle dance, the field holler, the yelp, the cry, the keen, the song are significant registers of existence for those cast out of the world.  The discourse of sound has been linked inextricably with the language of visibility—from torture, violation and spectacle, to subjection, to invisibility and surveillance. The photograph has been central in framing black life as a problem and illuminating the frequencies of black life that escape and exceed the capture of the white gaze and that trouble the frame.  The production and assembling of photographic images accompanied by textual annotation or photographs exhibited in installations with other printed and graphic material has been central to the project of representing black life and conveying its movement and beauty.  Since 1900, black thinkers and image-makers have employed photography as a tool to contest the fixing of black life as a social problem and to reimagine black existence and social movement.

The course will engage a series of photo texts, including W.E.B. Du Bois’s visual graphics and Georgia Negro photographs, Santu Mofokeng, The Black Photo Album, Langston Hughes & Roy De Carava, Sweet Fly Paper of Life, Richard Wright’s Twelve Million Black Voices, Ralph Ellison & Gordon Parks, Harlem Is Nowhere, Amiri Baraka, In Our Terribleness, Zoe Leonard, The Fae Richards Photo Archive, Emmanuel Iduma’s A Stranger’s Pose, Stanley Wolukau-Wanamba, One Wall A Web, Latoya Ruby Frazier, The Notion of Family, and Claudia Rankine, Citizen.  These texts offer densely layered accounts of blackness and black sociality that are not restricted to the visual — they are also haptic and sonic engagements.  These visual-textual assemblages perceive black life outside the grid of visuality that renders blackness a problem for study and an object for classification or eradication. By looking at a series of historical and contemporary black photo books, the seminar will address the visual and sonic frequencies of black life.