“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.” - Audre Lorde, a Caribbean-American thinker and poet
To take Lorde’s thought to the field of media and popular culture studies, our ability to face differences is crucially shaped by inclusions, exclusions and tones in the media. Issues such as multiculturalism, immigration, ethnic and racial “acceptance,” and the divide between the “west” and the “third world” are as acute as ever. Legacies of colonial stereotypes are visible across media cultural landscapes, from black and Latina women’s twerking bottoms in music videos to Hollywood’s tokenism and continued obsession with white (straight male) stories; from online debates and fictional representations of immigration and refugees to food and fashion advertisements.
On the course, these and many other historical and current tendencies are critically examined along with an introduction to postcolonial thought as a theoretical framework to rethink questions of difference and otherness. Through culturally and historically varying examples from Hollywood to Finland, from Senegal to the Arctic, from King Kong to Laverne Cox, we will explore how “race,” ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality intertwine and become marginalized or valued through structures, subject matters, makers and consumers of media. The course also deals with fields of thought overlapping with and related to postcolonial theory, such as critical studies of whiteness, queer of color critique, black feminist thought, and scholarship on transnationality and diaspora, which all share an interest in challenging hegemonic ways of knowing, reading and seeing.
Time: Tuesdays and Thursdays 14 - 16, Period III, Spring 2016
Place: Media Studies Seminar Room E325