BLST 038. Blackness on Film and Video: Black Time

In this course we will study the history and present of Black representation on film and video. The Black image on screen has been one of the most powerful tools for making, reflecting, and breaking the concept of race on a global scale. We will study the ways in which the moving image, in narrative, documentary, and experimental genres, shapes how we see and relate to difference across race, class, gender, and sexuality.

As a special focus, we will orient around BLACK TIME. Given that in the modern condition, black beings are among the most dispossessed of their time, our attention turns to the pleasures, potentials, pitfalls, and radical power of Black people using and inhabiting a time-based medium and art. Through time-bending strategies of montage, jump-cuts and durational performance, told in moments of time-travel, parallel dimensions, past lives and present-futures, we will consider the quantum properties of blackness which remake the world through story, lens, song and verse.

Social Sciences.
1 credit.
Eligible for FMST
Fall 2026. Rahaman.
Fall 2027 Batts.
Catalog chapter: Black Studies
Department website: https://www.swarthmore.edu/black-studies-program

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