This seminar focuses on African art, ritual, and performance issues developed within and circulated around the Afro-Atlantic, from West Africa to the Americas, particularly the U.S. South, Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, and the broader Caribbean. The course will explore the traditional arts and ideas deployed across the Atlantic during the Afro-Atlantic slave trade as a point of departure, and subsequent eras, up to and including the innovations of the contemporary moment. Modes of performativity intersected with issues of gender construction, feminisms, globalisms, border-discourses and ecological concerns will be central to the line of inquiry. Artists from the seminal exhibitions, Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art (Brooklyn Museum, 2007), Caribbean Art at the Crossroads of the World (El Museo del Barrio, 2012) and Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago (Wallach Gallery, Columbia University, 2018), among others, will be important to the analysis. HAAVC 3000 seminars continue developing students' visual analysis and research skills while providing students 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 specific topic/theme. 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. This course cannot fulfill the HAAVC 2000 requirement.

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