Preface:

In this course we considered a range of texts—on photog-raphy, film, painting, poetry, and theory—to explore both the creative works of Black artists and the critical discourses around Black visual representation. From the casta paintings of colonial Mexico to contemporary me-dia representations, in the white western canon, black peo-ple have been rendered mainly through “the typology of taint, / of stain: blemish: sullying spot:” to borrow the poet Natasha Trethewey’s incisive characterization. It is against this context that Black image makers have engendered a creative and critical practice and body of work, which re-veals the effect of what Toni Morrison called “the white gaze,” and moreover illuminates black interior life on its own terms. Among the themes we explored in-depth in-cluded: the representation of blackness in different visual media; the ways in which race intersects with other markers of identity like gender, sexuality, class, and nationality; the relationship between Black visual and literary arts; and the ethics of Black self-representation.