ARTH 448 - Advanced Seminar in Art and Film: Sounds that Move Us, Sounds that Escape Us
- J - 12:45-16:45
- EV-10.785
- INSTRUCTOR: DR. ERIN MANNING
Prerequisite: Enrolment in the Major in Art History and Film Studies; ARTH 348 or FMST 348; or written permission of the program director.
In a recent talk given at Concordia (March 2017), poet and scholar Claudia Rankine told a story about a tall black woman waiting in line at the post office. A white man walked ahead of her. The woman at the counter said “sir, the woman behind you was there first.” The white man said “oh! I hadn’t seen her.” The black woman said “you must be in a hurry!” He said “no, I just didn’t see you.”
This course takes as its starting point the realization that we are always missing things. We are not hearing them. Not seeing them. Not even noticing we are not noticing them. We will ask: what is it that we are missing, and how can we attend not only to the fact that we are missing it, but that there is a politics to what we are (not) hearing, (not) seeing?
Orienting around the sounds of alterity (of the alterity that is the share of our more-than humanness, of the alterity that is black life, of the alterity that is neurodiversity) this course will be an experiment in listening to that which we do not yet know how to hear, or to that which we hear much too clearly (and can’t fathom how others are not hearing it). It is a course that also asks us how we might create conditions for a different kind of hearing, a hearing-with or a hearing-across.
Culling for key texts from the Black Studies tradition as well as texts from indigenous, palestinian, neurodiverse and queer scholars, we will listen to the interstices between the words and ask not only what else we might be able to hear but what the stakes are when learning begins to include what it works so hard to exclude. We will also listen to each other to hear the differential in the account of what is missing, of what is left unheard.
Finally, we will ask: what is a course without an aim, without a centre? What is a course that needs to tread lightly, to create the conditions for learning rather than knowing the way of learning in advance. Toward these ends, we will have the opportunity to explore, through art and cinema, through philosophy and cultural theory, how else this learning might happen.