Advanced Seminar Imagining Blackness
19.10.2017 – 08.02.2018
Leitung
Prof. Dr. Klaus Benesch
Zeit & Ort
Do 10-12 Uhr; Schellingstr. 3, VG, Raum S 106
The idea of the class is to discuss modes of imaging blackness, both within non-black and black American cultures themselves. From the slave narratives onwards the issue of how to envision the black subject as a human being and fellow American citizen has loomed large in American literature and culture. If Blacks, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. once remarked, "commenced [their] cultural life in this hemisphere as veritable deconstructions [...] of all that Western culture so ardently wished itself to be," a closer look at how images of blackness had been constructed in American literature, letters, and the media may help to understand the dynamic of race relations in the US and beyond.