360°: Paradigms of Revival
In a fundamentally decolonial spirit, this course cluster examines the ways colonialism has contained, collected, captured, and commodified Blackness, a practice that circulates objectified images of the peoples, cultures, and cultural objects of Africa and the African Diaspora.
In a fundamentally decolonial spirit, this course cluster examines the ways colonialism has contained, collected, captured, and commodified Blackness, a practice that circulates objectified images of the peoples, cultures, and cultural objects of Africa and the African Diaspora.
In a fundamentally decolonial spirit, this course cluster examines the ways colonialism has contained, collected, captured, and commodified Blackness, a practice that circulates objectified images of the peoples, cultures, and cultural objects of Africa and the African Diaspora. Furthermore, we explore how African cultural traditions such as dance and artwork become suppressed and manipulated by western institutions such as academia and the museum. This cluster aims to use liberatory strategies to reconstruct notions of Blackness beyond the strongholds of colonialism, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and “the chattel principle.” To be specific, we will investigate the artistic expressions of African dance and African artwork through new liberatory post-colonial educational frameworks to consider how Black culture expression and Black cultural legacy across the African diaspora have been sustained and revived, despite systematic attempts to capture, condemn or contain these artistic expressions. Through reviving and futuring Black Radical traditions in collaboration with Queer and Afro Feminist theory and practice, we offer new context and new life for understanding, experiencing, and embodying Africanness and Blackness.
Taught over the course of the academic year 2022-2023, students will enroll in Dance and Education in the fall, and History of Art in the spring. Guest lectures, language practice, and local field trips will span the year, and a 9-day field study in Cape Verde is scheduled for March 3-12, 2023. The island archipelago in the transatlantic is an ideal location for exploring movements coming to and from the African continent. Cape Verde was once a significant center of the African slave trade. Despite tremendous influxes of cultural violence from slavery and colonialism, Cape Verde has sustained a unique African culture in dynamic ways. Cape Verde presents a small microcosm of neocolonial reality and resistance - it offers a collective window into resiliency, adaptation, and cultural persistence.
Courses
How do practices of embodiment, choreography, artistry, performance, testifying, and witnessing guide us to transformative and liberation action in our lives? This course, taught by Lela Aisha Jones, excavates the adornment of beings/bodies and the making of sacred spaces for embodied performance, introspection, and ceremonial dance. We will take up the notion of the being/body as an altar and the importance of costume and garb in setting the scene for activism, ritual, and staged offerings. The cognitive has gotten us here, what might continuums of believing in the being/body unveil? Expect to dance, move, write, discuss, create projects, and engage in a variety of textual and media resources. We will work individually and collectively for communal learning. The content for this course will be steeped in the lives, cultures, and practices of black and brown folks. This is a writing and dance attentive course. No dance experience necessary, just courage to move.
Formal schooling is often perceived as a positive vestige of colonization, yet traditional practices continue a legacy of oppression, in different forms. This course will analyze education practices, language, knowledge production, and culture in ways especially relevant in the age of globalization. We will explore and contextualize the subjugation of students and educators that perpetuates colonialist power and implement practices that amplify the voices of the marginalized. We will learn lessons in liberation from a historical perspective and consider contemporary influence, with a cross-continental focus. Liberatory education practices have always existed, often on the margins of colonial forces, but present nonetheless. This course will support students' pursuit of a politics of resistance, subversion, and transformation. We will focus on the development of a critical consciousness, utilizing abolitionist and fugitive teaching pedagogy and culturally responsive pedagogy as tools for resistance. Students will engage with novels, documentaries, historical texts, and scholarly documents to explore US and Cape Verdean education as case studies. In this course, taught by Chanelle Wilson, we will consider the productive tensions between an explicit commitment to ideas of progress, and the anticolonial concepts and paradigms which impact what is created to achieve education liberation.
This course, taught by Monique Scott, explores how "traditional" African art is anything but static, inert and ahistorical. We approach African arts--the sculptures, costumes, masks, textiles and other material cultural that comprise the majority of African art in western museums--as something with lived experiences and living histories. Moreso, we explore recent global and political movements towards the reckoning, repatriation and resuscitation of African Art in Western museums and museums of the African Diaspora. We will also consider the mobilization of African art in the Negritude, Anti-Colonial and Black Power movements in the 20th century as well as the mobilization of African art, both traditional and contemporary, in 21st century movements to "decolonize" museums and affirm that Black Lives Matter. Along with African material culture, we will also think about the role of historical monuments in civic spaces in concretizing notions of race and consider how new articulations of Blackness can resist concretized racial hierarchies and reconceptualize the past and the future of the African Diaspora in radical new ways.