Where, exactly, does blackness take place? Black women? Black queer people? Images, ideas, and assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality are mapped onto our bodies and are enmeshed with how we think, feel, and move about the landscapes we move through—and black people’s, black women’s, and black queer people’s ways of being are often made to be threatening presences that “need” to be policed, contained, and, more often than not, completely excised. In this course, we will consider how black feminist approaches to geographic space—focusing on landscapes, bodies, and affects as real and symbolic geographic spaces—reveal important sites where these restrictive understandings of blackness, gender, and sexuality can be refused and redefined.
This course pays critical attention to contemporary art practices as sites where black feminist geographies are theorized, imagined, and enacted. We read the work of Katherine McKittrick, Saidiya Hartman, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Hortense Spillers, and others alongside the work of artists including Carrie Mae Weems, Adrian Piper, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Lauren Halsey, Yetunde Olagbaju, and more.