AAAS 571 Images of Black People in Film and Popular Media for Spring Quarter 2011

This course examines the construction of black masculinity in contemporary film and other popular media forms. Instead of approaching the image of the black male through what film scholar Ed Guerrero has called a schizophrenic way of positioning black men at the poles of celebrity and criminal, this course will examine texts and draw on paradigms that approaches the black male subject as embodying an array of diverse and complex identities. We will accomplish this by considering how race, gender, sexuality, class and nation intersect and produce narratives that challenge narrow binaries of black manhood, focusing specifically on sports and the global color line; race, gender and class in the post-civil rights era; and the dilemma of racial authenticity in contemporary films like The Hurricane, He Got Game, Madam Sata, Blue Collar, Killer of Sheep, Talk to Me, I’m Through with White Girls, Brother to Brother, Medicine for Melancholy, and through the visual representation and media responses to Lebron James as a “free agent” and Jay-Z’s critical memoir, Decoded. All films will be paired with supplemental critical articles.



Simone Drake
Gateway Film Center
House 4
T 10:30-1:18
TH 10:30-12:18
Department of African American and African Studies
486 University Hall