Blackness and Breathing Beyond the Contemporary Moment

I can’t breathe. For many, Eric Garner’s final words made prominent the social, political, economic, and environmental phenomena that gave rise to his premature loss of life. How do we, without reducing Garner’s life to his death, attend to the ways that Black breathlessness has become—in fact, has been—a defining factor of Blackness? Not just in moments of spectacular death, but particularly in the everyday lived experience of Black people? How do we understand Black breathlessness as not merely a metaphor, but a material reality? How do we theorize breath as shaping Black life, death, and knowing in the United States? This course provides a historically grounded look at Black breathlessness from enslavement to the contemporary moment.

Sample Texts:

• Blackpentecostal Breath by Ashon Crawley

• “Settler Atmospherics” by Kristen Simmons

• Notes on the State of Virginia by Thomas Jefferson

• Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs

• The Sound of Race by Nina Sun Eisheim

• Animacies by Mel Chen

• Nat Turner: Revolution by Kyle Baker

Sample Assignment:

Over the course of the semester, you will be placed in groups to collaboratively complete your own creative critical digital project. We will be using the ArcGIS StoryMaps program for the project, which will then be publicly available at the conclusion of the course. There will be “lab time” set aside every two weeks for groups to work in real time with media experts on their projects, learning how to record sound and video, interview podcast guests, plot data on GIS systems, and more.