JAN 122 - The Art of Race: (Re)-Imagining Ethnicity and Identity in Literature, Art, & Pop Culture

Type:  In-Person

Course Meeting Days & Times: MTThF, 9:15 AM-11:45 AM

Instructor(s): Meneses, Rashaan

Email: rm7@stmarys-ca.edu

Fee: $25

Course Description:  How do writers and artists such as danez smith, Beyoncé, Ice Cube, Kara Walker, and other historically marginalized creative practitioners, subvert, de-center, and make new notions of race, identity, gender, and sexual orientation? How do they challenge cultural otherness to incite as writer Pankaj Mishra calls “a bolder cartography of the imagination”? In this class, we will explore how writers, musicians, artists, and comedians make stylistic choices of form and content to challenge dominant narratives and put center stage traditionally marginalized voices, neglected histories, and sub-histories. The aim of this course is to discover how art can complicate and challenge some of our greatest public narratives: race and gender; and how these narratives serve as writer Kaitlyn Greenridge says as a “collective and imagined space that exists only as a metaphor, rhetorical argument, figurative language, in short, as a fiction, though that does not mean that [they are] not real.”

Reading from diverse authors and viewing other artistic forms, we will consider the many different ways art and pop culture help us understand and challenge identity and politics, and conversely how we can interrogate notions of identity and politics to create art that incites a world awareness. This course may include a field trip to a local art museum such as the San Francisco Asian Museum or the Museum of African Diaspora as well as in-class visits from guest artists.

 

Prerequisites & Notes
None

Credits: 3