Spring 2014
Department of History of Art and Visual Culture
Rhode Island School of Design
ARTH H445: CRITICAL DISCOURSE ON THE BLACK FEMALE BODY
Spring 2014
Instructor: Dr. Bolaji Campbell
CB 301 M 9:40-12:40
Office: CB 515
Office Hours: Monday/Tuesday/Friday—1:00-2:00
or by appointment
Phone: 277-4870
email: bcampbel@risd.edu
course website: http://faculty.risd.edu/bcampbel/blackfemalebody.htm
CRITICAL DISCOURSE ON THE BLACK FEMALE BODY
This seminar focuses on the history, discourses and transformations of the black female
body as contested site of sexuality, resistance, representation, agency and identity in
American visual culture. Organized thematically, with examples drawn from painting,
sculpture, photography, film, popular culture and mixed media installations, we examine
how the deployment, manipulations and construction of the signification of the
asexualized mammy complex is juxtaposed against the jezebel vixen in a shifting terrain
from the antebellum era through the “post-racial” decade of the 21st century.
COURSE PLAN
The required texts are:
1) Patton, S (1998) African American Art, Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press.
2) Harris, M D (2003), Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation, Chapel Hill
and London: The University of North Carolina Press.
3). Archer-Straw, Petrine (2000) Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in
the 1920s London: Thames and Hudson (Available at the College Bookstore)
Also recommended but not required:
4). Collins, Lisa Gail (2002) The Art of History: African American Women Artists
Engage the Past, New Brunswick & London: Rutgers University Press.
5). Deborah Willis and Carla Williams (2002), The Black Female Body: A Photographic
History, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
6). Robinson, J.T, (1996) Bearing Witness: Contemporary Works by African American
Women Artists, New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., and Spelman College,
Atlanta;
Students are required to read and take notes on all assigned readings prior to their
presentations in class in order to make meaningful and intelligent contribution in class.
REQUIREMENT
There will be two major written assignments. The first is a 4-5 page critical analysis of
the work of a black female subject, based on formal or style elements. The style analysis
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paper is due on March 17, 2014. You should attach a color photograph or line
illustration/drawing to your essay. The second assignment is a contextual exploration of
your style analysis paper. In the second assignment, it is expected that students will
engage matters of identity, ethnicity, race, gender, representation, empowerment,
sexuality etc. The expectation is a 10-15 page paper, which must be developed in
consultation with the instructor. The contextual analysis paper is due on April 28 2014,
and this will form the basis of your final class presentation on May 5 or 16, 2014
EVALUATION
Each student is expected to attend all class meetings and complete the class
projects/papers; write 2 short paragraphs and/or reaction critique of the assigned weekly
class readings.
Overall, students will be evaluated based on the following criteria in the course:
Preparation, Attendance and Participation in class
1st Paper
Final Paper/Project
Class Presentation
20%;
30%
30%
20%
COURSE OUTLINE
Week 1: February 17: INTRODUCTION review of syllabus, expectations & procedures
FILM: AFRICAN AMERICAN ART; PAST AND PRESENT; ETHNIC NOTIONS
Week 2: February 24: SETTING THE STAGE: African Aesthetics and the origin of
African American Art
Joseph Holloway, "The Origins of African American Culture", Africanisms in American
Culture, pp. 1-18
Floris Barnett Cash, Kinship and Quilting: An Examination of an African American
Tradition, Journal of Negro History, Vol. 80, No 1, Winter 1995
Tritobia Benjamin, "Triumphant Determination: The Legacy of African American
Women Artists", Bearing Witness, pp 49-82.
Patton, S, "Introduction" and Nineteenth-Century America, the Civil War and
Reconstruction", African American Art, pp. 11-103
Lisa Gail Collins, The Art of History: African American Artists Engage the Past, pp.6498
Babatunde Lawal, "Some Aspects of Yoruba Aesthetics", British Journal of Aesthetics, 3
(15) 1974
Thompson, “Aesthetics”, in Black Gods and Kings, Ch: 3/1-7
Week 3: March 3: (Mis-) Representation, Pseudo Science, and Racialized Discourse
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Brian Wallis, "Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz's Slave Daguerreotypes",
American Art, Vol. 9, # 2 (Summer 1995), pp. 39-61.
David Goldberg, "The Social Formation of Racist Discourse", Anatomy of Racism, pp.
295-318.
W.J.T. Mitchell, "Narrative, Memory, Slavery", Picture Theory, pp. 183-207.
Barbara McCaskill, "Yours Very Truly" Ellen Craft-The Fugitive as Text and Artifact",
African American Review, Vol., 28, # 4 (1994), pp. 509-529.
Cheryl Harris, "Whiteness as Property", Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that
Formed the Movement, pp. 276-291.
Michael D. Harris, Colored Pictures "Introduction" pp. 1-12; Constructing and
Visualizing Race, pp. 13-37; The Nineteenth Century Image Ideology, 40-82.
Petrine Archer-Straw, “Packaging the Primitive”, in Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and
Black Culture in the 1920s.
Deborah Willis and Carla Williams, “Colonial Conquest”, in The Black Female Body: a
Photographic History, pp. 8-82
Lisa Gail Collins, The Art of History: African American Women Artists Engage the Past,
pp. 11-36
Film: From These Roots
Week 4: March 10: Romantic Traditions and the Harlem Renaissance:
The Contested Sites
Sharon Patton, "Twentieth Century America and Modern Art 1900-60", pp. 15-181
Kirsten P. Buick, "The Ideal Works of Edmonia Lewis: Invoking and Inverting
Autobiography", Reading American Art, pp. 190-207
Lisa Gail Collins, The Art of History: African American Artists Engage the Past, pp.3763
Week 5: March 17: Re-Writing History, Creating Space: Women's Representation
within the Dialectics of Modernism, Postmodernism and Black Feminism
Ann Gibson, "Faith Ringgold's Picasso Studio", in Faith Ringgold's French Collection
and Other Story Quilt: Dancing at the Louvre, pp. 64-73
Michele Wallace, "Modernism, Postmodernism and the Problem of the Visual in AfroAmerica Culture", Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture, pp. 39-57.
Patricia Leighten, "The White Peril and L'Art Negre: Picasso, Primitivism, and
Anticolonialism", Art Bulletin (December1990).
Freida High, "Afrofemcentrism and Its Fruition in the Art of Elizabeth Catlett and Faith
Ringgold, Expanding Discourse, pp. 47-85
Lisa Gail Collins, The Art of History: African American Artists Engage the Past, pp.3754
1st (STYLE ANALYSIS) PAPER DUE
Film: The Last Story Quilt
Week 6: March 24: SPRING RECESS
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Week 7: March 31: Ambivalence and Parody: Kara Walker; Renee Cox; Lorna
Simpson; Carrie Weems
DuBois-Shaw, Gwendolyn. “The Rememory of Slavery”, in Seeing the Unspeakable:
The Art of Kara Walker
DuBois-Shaw, Gwendolyn. “Censorship and Reception”, in Seeing….
Janus, Elizabeth, “As American as Apple Pie”
Sheets, Hilarie, “Cut it Out”, ArtNews, April 2002
Anne Wagner, Kara Walker: the black-white relation", in Kara Walker: Narratives of a
Negress, pp. 91-101
Michael Harris, Jezebel, Olympia, and the Sexualized Women, Colored Pictures, pp. 126147; 204-223
Willis, Deborah and Carla Williams. The Black Female Body: a Photographic History,
“The Cultural Body”, p. 83-137
Week 8: April 7: Reclamation of Identity and Individual Empowerment
Renee Stout; Betye & Alison Saar
Harris, M.D. “Resonance, Transformation, and Rhyme”, in Astonishment and Power, pp.
107-155;
Harris, Michael D. Colored Pictures…, 237-245 pp.
Lisa Gail Collins, The Art of History: African American Artists Engage the Past, pp. 5563
Week 9: April 14: Reclamation of Identity and Individual Empowerment II:
Campbell, B (2003) "Altars of Memory and of Identity: The Art of Sonya Clark", in
Marvels of the African World: African Cultural Patrimony, New World Connections, and
Identity, pp.395-410
Week 10: April 21: Memory, Diaspora and Reconstituting the Past:
Sokari Douglas-Camp; Maria Magdalena Campos-Pon; Babette Wainwright
Campbell, B. “Of Storytelling and the Slippery medium of Clay: Babette Wainwright’s
image of the Woman at the Diasporic Crossroads, in Journal of African and Black
Diaspora;
Enwenzor, Okwui and Lisa D. Freiman (2007) Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons:
Everything is Separated by Water, New Haven: Yale University Press
Harris, Michael, Colored Pictures…..180-183 pp.
Week 11: April 28: Student Presentations
Week 12: May 5: Student Presentations
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Week 13: May 16: SUBMISSION OF FINAL PROJECT –Liberal Arts Exam Day
CB 521 between 10:30-12:00
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