Postgraduate Course: Battleground: Nineteenth-, Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century African American Portraitures (HIAR11137)
Course Outline
| School | Edinburgh College of Art |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course introduces students to nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first-century traditions of African American portraiture and portrait-making including mixed-media assemblage, painting, photography, sculpture, drawing, video and installation art. African American artists rely on portraiture to represent, remember and reimagine the individual and collective 'witness self' (Clarissa Sligh) in their fight against a white racist and white supremacist western art world 'battleground' (Whitfield Lovell). They pioneer experimental formal strategies and innovative thematic agendas in their ongoing liberation labours in support of past, present, and future Black radicalism and resistance movements. |
| Course description |
This course introduces students to nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American artists for whom the fight for the right to power over their self-representation in portraiture and portrait-making traditions in the United States is a human rights battleground. As African American artist-activist-liberator, Clarissa Sligh, declares, 'portraits' are a representation and reimagining of the 'witness self' in the liberation toolkit of African American expressive artistic traditions and at the heart of their freedom and resistance movements. Working against a centuries-long backdrop of U.S. histories of enslavement, racist prejudice and persecution, segregation and lynchlaw, and an unending struggle for the fight for equal civil, moral, social and political rights that continues to the present day, African American artists and activists have developed and continue to develop formal and thematic strategies in which they resist, defy and defeat white supremacist dominant iconographic.
Students will study the experimental strategies of portrait-making and self-portraiture employed by African American artists and activists working across an over 200-year period in order to research their aesthetic forms, narrative practices, storytelling traditions and self-representational agendas. African American artists rely on a vast array of art-making techniques in their portrait-making practices in which they bear witness to their brilliantly incisive understanding of western art 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, literary and artistic cultures worldwide. We will examine the ways in which African American artists work with experimental practices across their paintings, sculptures, drawings, photography, quilts, ceramics, murals, posters and digital, installation, video and performance art.
The course is taught across ten weekly two-hour seminars. Students will engage by reading 1-4 required essays in advance of each session. In class, students will be supported to participate in general discussion of the readings and visual material, and to work in small groups to discuss specific questions and address visual analysis of specific works.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
| Additional Costs | This Course does not require any additional costs to be met by the Student. |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2025/26, Available to all students (SV1)
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Quota: 0 |
| Course Start |
Semester 1 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Lecture Hours 10,
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 10,
Feedback/Feedforward Hours 1,
Summative Assessment Hours 2,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
173 )
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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.
1. Essay question & Rationale, 1000 words, 30%, Weeks 4-6, related to Learning Outcomes 1-2.
2. Essay, 3000 words, 70%, Exam diet, related to Learning Outcomes 1-3.
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| Feedback |
Formative feedback:
There will be an opportunity for informal discussion and peer review of the Essay Question and Rationale in class, prior to its submission.
Throughout the course there will be ongoing informal feedback opportunities with the CO and peers during seminars.
Summative feedback:
The Course Organiser will provide written comments on the Essay Question and Rationale, with the option of additional one-to-one meetings on request.
Written feedback will be provided on the Essay.
Summative feedback will be provided according to University regulations. |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Construct original, clear and coherent arguments concerning the self-representational formal and thematic strategies at work within African American portrait-making traditions.
- Apply interdisciplinary skills in order to extrapolate, evaluate and assess ideas from a wide range of primary and secondary source materials, including visual as well as textual sources.
- Analyse artworks using recognised critical methodologies to substantiate and illustrate those arguments.
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Reading List
Braithwaite, Peter. Rediscovering Black Portraiture. J. Paul Getty Trust, 2023.
Du Bois Shaw, Gwendolyn. Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century. Addison Gallery of American Art, 2006.
Powell, Richard. Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture. University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Van Horn, Jennifer. Portraits of Resistance: Activating Art During Slavery. Yale University Press, 2022.
Willis, Deborah. Family History Memory: Recording African American Life. Hylas Publishing, 2005. |
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 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 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 class discussion The emphasis on seminar class discussion 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. |
| Special Arrangements |
Where there is an option, PGT students must take this course rather than the level 10 Picturing Power: Black Photographers and Photographic Histories in USA 1845-1945. |
| Keywords | Portraiture,Resistance,Aesthetics,Liberation,Representation |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Prof Celeste-Marie Bernier
Tel: (0131 6)50 4114
Email: Celeste-Marie.Bernier@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | |
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