Scholar-artist Ekow Eshun describes the “Black fantastic” as the way artists and creatives from
across the African diaspora grapple with over four hundred years of Black presence in the West.
To go in search of the Black fantastic means looking at and understanding histories of racial
violence, struggles for liberation, and expressions of ecstasy in the process of imagining new
social relations. Although the Black Fantastic is often associated with Afrofuturism exclusively,
this course goes in search of the Black fantastic during the 1980s and 90s when African
American culture enters the US popular cultural mainstream. This period provoked anxieties
about the relationship between art and politics in the reactions to art and AIDS activist groups
like ActUp, to the New Black Realism in film (Boys in the Hood, New Jack City, and Set It Off for
examples), to the art forms emerging from Hip Hop culture (rap, graffiti, and breakdancing),
and to the challenges Black creative writers made to the canon of US literature.
This course goes in search of the Black Fantastic in two specific ways – 1) we will engage with
the culture expressions and political context of the 1980s and 90s and 2) we will explore UCSB
archives to develop our understanding about the ways Black readers (and spectators) shaped
the discussion of art and politics from the same period. We will examine various media forms
(books, film, art, and music) as well as cultural criticism (Greg Tate, Stuart Hall, Manthia
Diawara, Robin Kelley, and Tricia Rose). Students will use performance theory, audience
ethnography, and their archival research to develop multi-media research projects on the
relationship between artist and audience, and art and politics during the era.