COURSE VISION

Black Phoenix Rising is a multimodal project that explores Black people’s practices of resisting death and the creative ways they transform the symbolic meanings of life, death, and resurrection in Black life and culture. The course explores social theories and creative practices in the Black radical and aesthetic traditions that centers Black people’s everyday practices of resistance, through artistic expressions of self, freedom and solidarity and analyses the role of consciousness, spirituality, and affect in Black lives.

Black Phoenix Rising builds on the figure of the phoenix as an organizing metaphor for Black peoples’ contestations with death and as a site for Black radical analysis. The phoenix is a mythological deity in the form of a large bird that symbolizes the cycle of life, death and resurrection. The phoenix dies and rises again through self-consumption or pyrrhic self-immolation; stories inspired by the Black phoenix remind us that death is not and never was the end for Black people. By telling the stories of Black people, real and imagined, who cut racism against the grain of death, Black Phoenix Rising counters the narrative that Black people’s only meaningful existence is death through politically and structurally informed creative storytelling.

Course Schedule

The course will run for six weeks, beginning March 7.

Week 1: March 7 – March 13
Introductions, the Syllabus, and Phoenix Stories

Week 2: March 14 – March 20
FIRE: Threat Analysis, #BlackLivesMatter, and Black Radical Praxis
The element of fire signifies the phoenix in a hot and inflamed state, fanning its flaming wings.

Week 3: March 21 – March 27
WIND: Shadows of Tomorrow, Practices of Fugitivity, and Healing Movements
The element of wind signifies the phoenix in an active state of migration, marronage, and fugitivity.

Week 4: March 28 – April 3
EARTH: Replanting Resistance, Black Radical Ecologies, and Signs of Regeneration
The element of earth signifies the phoenix in its smoldering ashen state, having exhausted its flames, now returning to the soil.

Week 5: April 4 – April 10
WATER: Rememory, Makeshift Memorials, and Rest
The element of water signifies the phoenix in a cool state of incubation, memory, and restful enclosure within an egg.

Week 6: April 11 – April 17
End Times? Seeking Closure and Community in the Midst of Chaos

Course Expectations

In Black Phoenix Rising, you will encounter a curated menagerie of readings, videos, art and music, and resources that illuminate each week’s themes. Each week features sets of pre-recorded video lectures in which I discuss big ideas from this curated menagerie and class projects through which you can engage more deeply in course content. You will be invited to a series of live virtual conversations with me as the course unfolds.

Acknowledgements

Intellectual, creative, and financial support for Black Phoenix Rising has been provided by the Center for the Humanities, the Creative Campus Initiative, the Digital Scholarship Innovation Fund, and the Center for African American Studies at Wesleyan. Professor Hatch co-produced Black Phoenix Rising: Death and Resurrection in 2017-2018 as a sociologically-inspired creative arts project featuring a series of collaborations between myself, a group of brilliant Wesleyan undergraduates, and Ernesto Cuevas, Jr., whose work is featured above. This initial collaboration produced 7 pieces including a hand-drawn original comic book, two films, two magazines, sculpture, and a 30-minute soundscape, and a new website, all of which we exhibited at the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery at the Wesleyan Center for the Arts on February 22 – February 26, 2018.

Shot out to The Black Phoenix Rising Collective: Kaiyana Cervera, Xavier Cornejo, Ernesto Cuevas, Jr., Kelly D’oleo, Ainsley Eakins, Grace Handy, Tony Hatch, Paige Hutton, Tedra James, Victoria King, Caroline Liu, Jumoke McDuffie-Thurmond, Josh Nodiff, Henry Prine, Aleyda Robles, Belén Rodríguez, Jeneille Russell, Delia Tapia, Jordan White, and Grace Wong.

Shout out to Brianna Mebane for her expert web design consultancy and to Dan Nocera at the Center for New Media at Middlesex Community College for their creative and editorial labors in filming material for this course.