Documenting Black Experiences

Explores how Black experiences have been documented and how crucial stories woven from real life get told. Students engage wide ranging contemporary and historical materials, including nonfiction, memoir, fiction, documentary and dramatic film, theater, poetry and music. Our aspirations are historical, but with an understanding that academic history, though irreplaceable, barely touches the range of storytelling that makes Black lives not only matter but transform the spaces in which they unfold. Our explorations are political, but in the largest sense—how Black power comes from making higher truth a tool, a weapon and a way of being.