Comparative Literature: After/Life: Black Surrealisms of Death & Refusal

Course description:

Death continues to play a central role in Black expressive cultures, functioning as both an aesthetic and political force across literature, music, performance, and visual culture. From the Middle Passage to practices of memorialization today, Black artists, writers, and scholars have reimagined death not only as loss, absence or an end point, but as a site of creativity, resistance, and generative possibility, from which rebirth, resurrection, and new forms of life emerge. In pursuing these themes, we will explore how Black artists turn to surrealist and experimental aesthetic strategies to insist that the very structure of how we perceive reality must be disrupted. 

“In the midst of so much death and the fact of Black life as proximate to death, how do we attend to physical, social, and figurative death and also to the largeness that is Black Life, Black life insisted from death?”

Drawing on this question by Christina Sharpe, Professor of English Literature and Black Studies, the course explores and historicizes how the artistic practices of the Black Radical Tradition, particularly within the realm of Black Surrealism, address the brutality and absurdity of colonial and anti-Black structural violence, while imagining and building worlds beyond them. It examines how Black artists, writers, and scholars engage with death, life, and the otherwise within the afterlives of slavery and colonialism.

In contemporary culture, Black Surrealism appears widely, particularly in visual culture, gaining widespread and popular recognition in film, tv, fine art, and music videos. We will explore some of these contemporary manifestations alongside earlier historical examples from the U.S., Africa, and the wider African diaspora. We will trace the continuities, transformations, and artistic strategies that define the aesthetic and movement across time and space. 

We will explore all this in relation to the following conceptual threads:

• Black Time, Madness 
• Screams & Open Caskets
• Ghosts & The Black Aquatic
• Marvelous Dreams, Miserable Nightmares
• Hesitating Between the Real, Spiritual & Fantastic

Historical, critical, and theoretical literature will guide our engagement with a wide range of cultural materials, including film, video art, music, poetry, and literature. We will explore works such as music videos by Kendrick Lamar and Flying Lotus; the music of Sun Ra and Abbey Lincoln; video art by Jenn Nkiru and Arthur Jafa; Mati Diop’s feature film Atlantics (2019); the literary fiction of Henry Dumas and Toni Morrison; Aimé Césaire’s poetry; and television episodes from Atlanta and Random Acts of Flyness, among others. Together, we will consider how these works intersect with political movements, revolutionary struggles, and broader questions of liberation.

The ambition of the course is to equip students with a range of theoretically grounded analytical approaches and conceptual tools that cultivate a critical and imaginative capacity to understand and communicate how Black radical practices engage with the challenges of our time. Students will develop tools for reading across literature, theory, and visual culture, while also honing their ability to analyze how artistic and popular cultural practices grapple with death, the afterlives of slavery and colonialism, and strategies of refusal and resistance.

Throughout the course, students will engage in practices of critical reflection on their own situated positioning as academic subjects within the university in the Nordic region. This will be complemented by reflections on ethical and citational practices that center accountability, reciprocity, desire and care in academic scholarship.