Title: Mini-Syllabus: Memes and Blackness

URL: https://entropymag.org/mini-syllabus-memes-and-blackness/

Description: Aggravating, relatable, funny, prescient– wherever you look on the Internet, memes are there. In this course, we will explore the interstices, overlaps, and connections between Blackness and meme culture. Memes have become a way of marking mundane everyday moments, groundbreaking political changes, and everything in between. But beyond their immediate comic nature, memes have a complex relationship with the Black culture and bodies that they so often portray. Black cultural production is a driving force of memes. Young Black people on the Internet create memes, consume memes, and help make them famous. But memes have also been a way in which stereotypes about Black people are perpetuated and put on endless repeat in the annals of cyberspace. One need only consider the popularity of classic memes such as Sweet Brown and Bed Intruder to see the ways in which gendered and racialized narratives about Black degeneracy and urban poverty have manifested themselves through this medium. Because of the proliferation of memes that poke fun at the behavior and speech patterns of unsuspecting, often working-class Black subjects, some writers have even compared memes to a modern-day form of minstrelsy.

Loading Wayback Capture Info...

Loading video data...