Corso: LETTERATURA ANGLO-AMERICANA 2023-2024 | Moodle Scienze umane

  • LETTERATURA ANGLO-AMERICANA - PROF. ANNA SCACCHI

    The Power of an Illusion: Representing Race in US literature and popular culture

    Glenn Ligon, "Self portrait exaggerating my black features / self-portrait exaggerating my white features," 1998

    Glenn Ligon, "Self portrait exaggerating my black features / self-portrait exaggerating my white features, "1998, silkscreen on canvas

    Race, according to most contemporary critical race theorists, is not a biological fact but rather a symbolic category which is constantly constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed via discursive practices. After a preliminary introduction to the current debate on the relation between reality and representation and to the interpretive methodologies employed by Visual Culture Studies, this course will explore the multiple meanings of blackness produced by the history of the Black Diaspora in the Americas. We will examine an array of texts (novels and short stories, films, graphic novels, popular culture), organized so as to illuminate a number of conceptual and thematic knots (gender, racial stereotypes, adoption/subversion of stereotypes, representations of black heroism), as a way to achieve a critical understanding of narrations and counternarrations of black identity.

    Classes will start on the 6th of March

    PLEASE NOTE: the class timetable for Wednesdays and Thursdays has changed. We will meet at 4.30 on both days, instead of 12.30