Blackness, Gender, and Experimental Form in Literature, Media, and Thought

This course examines black feminist experimentation in fiction, poetry, film, video, historiography, and theory. It explores what becomes possible when literary and visual works defy the rules of genre, medium, and tradition, and when creativity refuses respectability and fixed representations of black womanhood and femininity. What new forms emerge from the collapse of convention? What remains of gender and sexual identity when black feminist artists break the rules? By rejecting standard narrative protocols and demands for 'authentic' or 'positive' representation, this course treats art as a laboratory for thought - testing the limits of form and imagining what lies beyond racialized norms of type and aesthetic value.