ARTH 232 - African American Portraiture

FDR: Fine Arts (HA)
Credits: 3

In this course we will study the politics of representation (and the relationship between the image and ideology) in African American portraiture from the 18th century to the present. Aesthetics, gender, class, the impact of slavery, lynching, colonialism, neocolonialism, and globalization of the arts, as well as issues of memory, identity, subjectivity, historical “truth,” and race, will be explored in relation to African American portraiture and artists. We will consider the production, distribution, consumption, and archiving of these visual texts, and examine various genres and media of portraiture. As we analyze the portraits of Joshua Johnson, Julien Hudson, A.P. Bedou, W.E.B. DuBois, Lenwood Morris, and Dawoud Bey, among others, we will consider to what extent portraiture comments upon or subverts racial identities and social hierarchies, what role they play in protest movements, and whether one, as Audre Lorde asks, can ever dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.