ARTH 6610 Art History and Black Studies: Poetics of Relations

• Instructor: Dr. Joana Joachim

This course will consider some theories related to Black studies in visual art in Canada and elsewhere. We will discuss and examine how they can be used to analyze Black visualities and aesthetics. We will consider how to engage critically and rigorously with the work of Black artists from across the globe. Centering Édouard Glissant’s book Poetics of Relations (1997) we will engage with his conception of poetics of relations and creolization for reading Black cultural production. Through discussions about Black studies in art history, we will reflect on how these theories can serve to complicate our understandings and analyses of Black visual art specifically in Canada and the Caribbean as opposed other parts of the Black Atlantic world.