Undergraduate Course: Contemporary African American and Black British Visual Culture (HIAR10209)
Course Outline
| School | Edinburgh College of Art |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 4 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course introduces students to twentieth and twenty-first century African American and Black British artists, art practices, art traditions, art theories, art philosophies, and art movements. African American and Black British artists rely on "images as weapons" (Charles White) in their fight against a white racist and white supremacist western art world and in their ongoing liberation labours in support of past, present, and future Black radicalism and resistance movements. |
| Course description |
This course introduces students to twentieth and twenty-first century African American and Black British artists for whom the fight for the right to the power over the image is a fight that is far from over. As African American artist, Charles White, declared, "images are weapons" in the liberation toolkit of historic and contemporary U.S. and African Diaspora freedom and resistance movements. Working against a centuries long backdrop of U.S. and transatlantic histories of enslavement, segregation, and lynchlaw, and an unending struggle for the fight for equal civil, moral, social, and political rights in the contemporary Black Lives Matter era, African American and Black British artists have and continue to develop formal and thematic strategies in which they resist, defy, and defeat white supremacist dominant iconographic that work to disrespect, dehumanize, and deny Black histories, memories, and narratives over the centuries. This course will introduce students to the lives, works, practices, traditions, movements, and worlds of African American and Black British artists working in the last fifty years in order to research their experimental aesthetic forms, narrative practices, storytelling traditions, and liberation politics. African American and Black British artists rely on a vast array of experimental art-making practices, philosophies, movements, and traditions to represent and remember centuries of histories, memories, and narratives that have been written out of the white supremacist history books let alone white supremacist, persecutory, racist, and dehumanizing literary and artistic cultures worldwide. In this course, we will examine the ways in which African American and Black British artists work with experimental practices across their paintings, sculptures, drawings, quilting, ceramics, woodcarving, photography, murals, posters, and digital, installation, video and performance art.
This course will be taught over 10 weekly lectures and seminars. Students will engage by reading in advance of each session and spending time individually and in groups on preparation and review.
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Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2024/25, Not available to visiting students (SS1)
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Quota: 20 |
| Course Start |
Semester 2 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Lecture Hours 10,
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 10,
Feedback/Feedforward Hours 2,
Summative Assessment Hours 2,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
172 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
This course has 2 assessment components.
- Essay question + rationale - 1000 words (30%), weeks 4-6. Each student will develop their own question and provide a rationale for the question.
- Essay - 3000 words (70%), Exam Diet.
The purpose of this assessment structure is to trace the development of students' ideas in a research project. Marking of the essay will take account of the extent to which each student's thinking has progressed from one assessment point to the next and what use they have made of the feedback offered . |
| Feedback |
Formative feedback:
Students will be provided with written and verbal formative feedback from the course organiser before submission of summative assessments as they plan and develop their work. Throughout the course there will be ongoing feedback opportunities.
Summative feedback:
Summative feedback will be provided according to University regulations.
The Course Organiser will provide comments on the essay question and rationale, with the option of additional one-to-one meetings with the Course Organiser to further discuss the feedback if requested.
Written feedback will be provided on the 3000-word essay. |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Construct original, clear and coherent arguments concerning the representation of histories, memories, and narratives within African American and Black British visual culture traditions
- Employ interdisciplinary skills in evaluating a wide range of primary and secondary source materials.
- Analyse artworks using recognised critical methodologies to substantiate and illustrate those arguments.
- Extrapolate, evaluate and assess ideas from a range of textual as well as visual sources in order to bring them to bear on their analyses of African American and Black British art-making practices and traditions.
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Reading List
Baucom, Ian, Sonia Boyce, Leon Wainwright and David A. Bailey, Shades of Black: Assembling Black Art in 1980s Britain. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.
Bernier, Celeste-Marie, Stick to the Skin: African American and Black British Art (1965-2015). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2018.
Chambers, Eddie, Black Artists in British Art: A History from 1950 to the Present. London: I. B. Tauris, 2014.
Farrington, Lisa, African-American Art: A Visual and Cultural History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Lewis, Samella, African American Art and Artists. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Powell, Richard A. Black Art: A Cultural History. London: Thames and Hudson, 2002. |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Personal and Intellectual Autonomy: This course will help students to develop their abilities as critical and reflective thinkers, by asking them to analyse and evaluate the arguments put forward in experimental art-making; and to consider the place of art-historical arguments in relation to wider social, cultural and political contexts of African American and Black British visual culture.
Research and Enquiry: The course will help students develop their abilities as creative problem-solvers and researchers, by asking them to explore the application of ideas and arguments to specific examples of artistic works and theoretical writings and, and to develop convincing interpretations, arguments and proposals of their own.
Communication: The course will help students develop their skills as effective communicators, in written form, through the coursework essay, as well as in spoken form, through the individual spoken presentation. The emphasis on seminar class discussion and the use of Autonomous Learning Groups will help students develop their skills as effective communicators, through listening to and engaging with others' ideas and working constructively through group discussion to develop new understanding. |
| Keywords | Aesthetics,Liberation,Representation,Narrative,Language,Politics,Memory,History |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Angeliki Roussou
Tel:
Email: angeliki.roussou@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Ms Susanne Neil
Tel:
Email: sneil@ed.ac.uk |
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