Spring 2023
Warrick Moses
3 credits
50% Graduate Coursework Requirement
An important part of identity construction is seeing one’s behaviors and orientations reflected in media production. Depictions of Black life in music, television, and film, allow listeners and viewers to recognize themselves as social actors, contributing to a sense of agency, validation, and belonging in the world. Too often representations of Black life in media are limited to tropes of either innate subservience or willful excess, thus limiting our understandings and imaginations of Black possibility. The intention of this course is to shift the prevailing narrative from how we are seen on screen, to how we see ourselves. Readings are drawn from film studies, gender studies, African and African American studies, psychoanalysis, and popular film criticism.