AASP350

This course examines cinema from the black Atlantic world, treating key films from Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States. Anticolonial work by Ousmane Sembene and Sarah Maldoror, memory work by Haile Gerima and Julie Dash, and vernacular filmmaking by Charles Burnett, Spike Lee, Perry Henzell, Melvin Van Peebles, and others will introduce us to the varied concerns of Black filmmakers in moments of independence struggle and post-emancipation identity formation. While eclectic in selection, our examination of these films will be oriented around a pair of questions. What is antiblackness and how does cinema encounter, contemplate, and critique it? How do different geographies and historical experiences shift cultural and political concerns, as well as the methods of cinema along with those differing concerns? Such questions will allow us to see how questions of antiblackness and Black life operate in the between and overlapping spaces of colonial experience, ghettoization, and sites of resistance, rebellion, and radicalism.