Back to Black and the Arts Movement

Submitted byJeeraik009 onSat, 07/04/2009 - 16:35
This summer, in addition to teaching my Caribbean Dialogs course, I am co-teaching a four week SCE summer session with Prof. Cheryl Finley. The course is called the Black Arts Movement and it examines the art, music, literature and film of African Americans during the 1960’s. The Black Arts Movement was an explosive cultural flourishing that emerged in the wake of African liberation and decolonization movements abroad and Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the USA and the African Diaspora. Watch the Video.
The course is taught using a wiki, virtual classroom and podcasts and seems perfectly suited to online learning because of its rich audio visual content. It considers art practices such as abstraction (Mel Edwards and Barbara Chase-Riboud), collage (Romare Bearden), performance (Faith Ringgold) and photography (Roy DeCarava, Dawoud Bey). All this will be examined alongside pioneering works of revolutionary theatre (Le Roi Jones), activist poetry (Sonya Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni), jazz (Nina Simone, Thelonious Monk), soul (James Brown, Aretha Franklin) and rock-n-roll (Jimi Hendrix).