Visual culture, Nicholas Mirzoeff's (1999) definition, is perhaps best understood as a tactic for studying the functions of a world addressed through pictures, images, and visualizations, rather than through texts and words. The focus in this course will be an exploration and interpretation of the African global experience through signs and symbols, still photography, television, video and film. Using discussions of visualizations in still and moving images, with an introduction to important films by African directors.
Students will explore the contemporary dialectical interactions between the indigenous traditions on the one hand and colonialism, Arabo-Islamization, Westernization, and Modernization on the other. Topics such as slave trade, roots and ancestry, diaspora, colonial dynamics, stereotypes, and Independence, will be discussed using images and film.
This course opens up discourse of Black visual culture with a heavey focus on Art and photography, and also some impoartant films.
Visualization is the universal language of the ages. Stories or narratives were the abstract mechanisms of visualization used by Jesus to explain Christian principles.
There is much education in visualization. Art does not just tell us about the subject, but also about the artist, images reveals the subject but moreso the photographer and the camera trained on a sequence of events reveals the motivations of the filmmaker. The stories and parables Jesus used the teach and spread the love of God, the way he painted images in the minds of his listeners, revealed of his immaculate temperament, and his mission.
Black visual culture has two perspectives. Views from within the frame and views from outside. One key feature is that compared to mainstream visual culture, black visual culture is, in many instances, viewed as "other," or outside the norm.
The impact of the image, whether in art, in photography, or in moving images is that there is much to be interpreted from understanding who is holding the paint brush, and who's behind the camera, as well as the view of the subject, the brush or camera reveals.
Students will review mainly art and photography of key black painters and photographers. Also artists and photographers who interpret black subjects in comparison.
Students have been bombarded with images most of their lives. Discussions revolve around their impressions of blacks and of Africa in the visuals they have seen.
