AFRC294 - FACING AMERICA

This course explores the visual history of race in the United States as both self-fashioning and cultural mythology by examing the ways that conceptions of Native American, Latino,and Asian identity, alongside ideas of Blackness and Whiteness, have combined to create the various cultural ideologies of class, gender, and sexuality that remain evident in historical visual and material culture. We will also investigate the ways that these creations have subsequently helped to launch new visual entertainments, inclduing museum spectacles, blackface minstrelsy, and early film, from the colonial period through the 1940s.