HSEM3245H

This course investigates blackness and the enduring legacy of racial constructions in the French-speaking world, with a particular emphasis on Africa, France, and the French Caribbean. We will study and discuss racial perceptions and representations of Africans and peoples of African origin as they are explored through literature and cinema and other visual arts.

The present course taps into the power of representation and the power embedded in visual images to engage students to reflect on the ways in which our perception of others, especially those racially different, is a discursive process in which visuals have always played an essential role. Focusing primarily on the French-speaking world (in Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean), the main premise of this course is that Africans (and Africa) as they are perceived in the West are largely the product of a gaze that “invented” and froze its object in an immutable time. The course starts out by examining the historical conceptualization of blackness and racial categories in French discourse, a rigorous theory and classification that would provide the foundation for the social organization of the plantation society and be emulated by all Western imperial powers. Next, we will discuss the ways in which French literature, film, and popular culture have apprehended blackness and made a critical contribution to the consolidation of the pervasive imagery that blackness conjures even today. We will analyze the power and the tenacity of tropes resulting from a construction that is removed from the historical experience of black peoples and from the lived experience of Africans in our time. Next, I will introduce students to literature and cinema produced by black artists from Africa and the African diaspora, focusing specifically on works that seek to challenge the persistent negative perceptions of Africans and black people in Western societies today. The course encourages students to develop a critical stance toward the knowledge on “Others” transmitted through various forms of representation, especially in our predominantly visual culture. In doing so, it challenges students to stop being passive consumers of such culture, to reevaluate their knowledge on Africa and black peoples, to think about the way in which such knowledge was constituted, and about the extent to which it derives from an “inherited gaze.” Authors and filmmakers whose works will be used include Charles Beaudelaire, Marquis de Sade, Isabelle Boni-Claverie, Claire Denis (France), Rachel Mbong (Switzerland), Maryse Condé, Euzhan Palcy (French Caribbean), Raoul Peck (Haiti), Leonora Miano (Cameroon) and Fatou Diome (Senegal).

000571

Periodic Fall & Spring