The idea of blackness is one that is ever shifting, sometimes in conflict with itself, and constantly accommodating new contexts. This course addresses the concept of blackness through performance, through the various methods of doing, being, and feeling that mark bodies, gestures, and places as black. It should be noted that performance, in this context, not only encompasses the framed/staged productions that have come to evoke blackness symbolically in the public imagination, but also performative approaches to evoking blackness in scholarship and the mundane negotiations of black identity in everyday life. This course centers on performance studies, but also pulls from African American studies, gender/women's studies, musicology, and literary theory in order to address both performance and blackness from an interdisciplinary perspective. Ultimately, this is a course that revels in the gray areas that exist between various competing constructions of authentic blackness and offers performance as a useful frame for understanding the simultaneous fixity and fluidity of blackness as a concept. |