Course Detail

W. E. B. Du Bois famously described the African-American experience as a kind of “double-consciousness, [a] sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,” torn between two identities: “an American, a Negro.” This course reflects this same duality, existing in tension between two simultaneous classes. The first half of the course examines the way that American popular cinema has represented the lives and humanity of black citizens—the “looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” that Du Bois refers to. This portion of the course will consider how the industry of Hollywood—a largely white, straight, and male institution—depicted and shaped the lives of black Americans for the movie-going public. The second half of the course examines how black filmmakers from the earliest moments of American filmmaking to our own moment have used cinema as a form of self-expression and meaning-making. This portion of the course considers black filmmaking both as a response to historical representations of African-Americans and as a cinematic history separate from a relationship to white America. In combining these two separate intellectual impulses, this course aims to instantiate Du Bois’s “double-consciousness” and do justice both to the need to examine Hollywood cinema’s history of racial injustice and to the desire to explore the rich tableau of black filmmaking in the United States.