BLST 044A. Touching Grass: The Black Outdoors

For W.E.B. DuBois, “whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!”. As Sylvia Wynter asserts, for the black enslaved and their descendants, “the land remained the earth” where the violence of the plantation could not erase the “secretive histories” situated in its adjacent plots. Rather, these plots contained the seeds of the plantation’s own unmaking. This course takes as its locus the contradictory relationship between the earth as property, and the earth as connection and sustenance. We will follow the creative strategies used by black artists in the global diaspora which intervene in the anti-black climate of enclosure and containment and reorient the terrain towards the everyday terms and practices of world building. Through an attention to works in film, durational performance, gathering, visual art, site-specific installations and land-based art, this course will adopt a Black Geographies framework which understands the relational approaches to interrupting empire, nationalism, militarism and patriarchy. Class sessions will include guest visits and field trips to regional sites as we explore all the ways we stay outside.
Humanities.
1 credit.
Eligible for ENVS.
Spring 2027. Rahaman.
Catalog chapter: Black Studies.
Department website: https://www.swarthmore.edu/black-studies

Access the class schedule to search for sections.