What is the color of African Third Cinema, a Bamako landscape painted by the World Bank, Nollywood action films, or of movies depicting of the lifestyles of Africans in different contexts of migration – From Northern Africa to Europe, between different African countries, imagining or living connections with the Caribbean, Brazil and the U.S.? While many critics and audiences look to African films as social registers of the continent’s life and culture (its vast heterogeneity makes the ability to do so comprehensively impossible), to bring these prevailing lenses into balance, the course will bring a critical emphasis to issues of abstraction and formalism in addition to the power of African film to tell a story of life, in a particular cultural instance, at a certain moment in time. Youth Culture and its role in framing “Africa” both within and outside of the continent will be a key theme throughout the semester. HAAVC 2000 courses develop students' visual analysis skills while providing the opportunity for in-depth study of the visual/structural artifacts associated with a particular topic, region, or movement. Students will also engage with the relevant primary/secondary literature for the topic at hand. Courses will pay particular attention to the larger cultural, historical, and theoretical/ideological contexts in which the visual artifacts and structures under consideration were created.

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