Melanie Herzog

Where is the Black Atlantic? What does it look, smell, taste, and feel like? How does it color our world? This class explores the visual and cultural history of the Black Atlantic?a phrase used to define the relationship between dissonant geographical locations that were forged into relationship with each other through the Transatlantic Slave Trade. We will forge an understanding of how vision, texture, touch, sound, and color owe their meanings through the Middle Passage and its production of arts of the Black Atlantic. Crucial to this class is the artwork of practitioners like Jacob Lawrence, Soly Cisse, AfriCOBRA, Aubrey Williams, Faustin Linyekula, Yinka Shonibare, and Renee Green. We will focus primarily on the visual history and cultural impact of the Middle Passage as discussed through the writings of Afro-Caribbean, West African, Black American, and Black British scholars. We will work with concepts like ?native? visual forms, the coloniality of painting, Negritude, and the anticolonial imagination.