This course explores the continuously circulating, cross-cultural dialogues and exchanges across Africa, Europe, the Caribbean and the Americas that constitute a Black Atlantic. It supports careful reading and critical listening of multidisciplinary artists, activists, curators, musicians, and scholars who exchange ideas in conversations, collaborative projects, and other venues. It also considers some of the discrepant and even contrary meanings of exchange. Topics covered in the course include:
• questions, forums, movements and networks that invite theorists to make abstract ideas about nationalism, modernity, and coloniality more legible, audible, and visible to diverse audiences
• the boundaries of ‘polite,’ ‘acceptable,’ and ‘appropriate’ discourse
• appropriation, misappropriation and ‘creative recycling’
• capitalist exchange
• cultural productions that transcend or contest capitalist systems of judgment and value.
May be offered jointly with HIST 403-002.
