Minor in Black Cinema and Media Studies (Minors)

Students on Summer 2019, Fall 2019, or Spring 2020 requirements BLKCNMDMIN

Requirements

The minor requires at least 15 credit hours, including the requirements listed below.

Introduction to Black Cinema and Media Studies. Two (2) courses:
- MSCH-C 212 Screening Race and Ethnicity
- MSCH-F 377 Cinemas of the Black Diaspora
MSCH-C 212 Screening Race and Ethnicity
Credits
3
Prerequisites
None
Description
Critically examines how race and/or ethnicity are mediated through screen and audio-visual media (including film, video, television, radio, internet) and their cultural contexts.Â Using humanities approaches, topics might focus on representations and debates within mainstream, art, or alternative media.Â May address histories of race, racism, and racial justice.Â Screenings may be required.
Repeatability
Credit given for only one of CMCL-C 201 or MSCH-C 212.
- Summer 2025CASE DUScourse
  
  Spring 2025CASE DUScourse
  
  Fall 2024CASE DUScourse
- Summer 2025CASE SHcourse
  
  Spring 2025CASE SHcourse
  
  Fall 2024CASE SHcourse
MSCH-F 377 Cinemas of the Black Diaspora
Credits
3
Prerequisites
None
Description
Examines filmmaking in the black diaspora as a formally innovative visual and narrative art form in world cinema. Studies select films for their political and cultural significance and shared themes. Topics include colonialism and postcoloniality; race, gender and sexuality; migration and exile; modernity; and the dislocating processes of globalization.
- Summer 2025CASE AHcourse
  
  Spring 2025CASE AHcourse
  
  Fall 2024CASE AHcourse
- Summer 2025CASE DUScourse
  
  Spring 2025CASE DUScourse
  
  Fall 2024CASE DUScourse
Advanced Black Cinema and Media Studies Electives. Both of the following:
1. Media School Elective. Two (2) courses:
  - MSCH-F 204 Topics in Media, Culture, and Society (approved topics only; see academic advisor)
  - MSCH-F 309 Images of War and Peace in Public Culture (approved topics only; see academic advisor)
  - MSCH-F 311 History of Media and Culture
  - MSCH-F 326 Authorship in the Media (approved topics only; see academic advisor)
  - MSCH-F 375 Race, Gender, and Representation
  - MSCH-F 392 Media Genres (approved topics only; see academic advisor)
  - MSCH-F 398 National and Transnational Cinemas (approved topics only; see academic advisor)
  - MSCH-F 420 Topics in Media History (approved topics only; see academic advisor)
  MSCH-F 204 Topics in Media, Culture, and Society
  Credits
  3
  Prerequisites
  None
  Description
  Relationship between communication media and a range of social institutions, practices, and beliefs. Course may focus on a particular medium and/or period (e.g., television and family, film and the Cold War, censorship and the media). Topic varies.
  Repeatability
  May be repeated with a different topic for a maximum of 6 credit hours in CMCL-C 204 and MSCH-F 204.
  Summer 2025CASE SHcourse
  
  Spring 2025CASE SHcourse
  
  Fall 2024CASE SHcourse
  MSCH-F 309 Images of War and Peace in Public Culture
  Credits
  3
  Prerequisites
  None
  Description
  Examines the cultural contestation of images of war and peace with a focus on the materiality of political images in a variety of verbal, visual, and acoustic media across a range of cultural forms such as film, literature, art, public memorials, and political texts.
  Repeatability
  May be repeated when the focus is on a different country or region for a maximum of 6 credit hours in CMCL-C 311 or MSCH-F 309.
  Summer 2025CASE AHcourse
  
  Spring 2025CASE AHcourse
  
  Fall 2024CASE AHcourse
  MSCH-F 311 History of Media and Culture
  Credits
  3
  Prerequisites
  None
  Description
  Historical development of media forms, institutions, and technology, from the origins of writing to digital media. Attention to characteristics of media, changes in media's role as a cultural force, transformations to media institutions, and the role of media in the development of public discourse. Considers continuity and change over time.
  Summer 2025CASE SHcourse
  
  Spring 2025CASE SHcourse
  
  Fall 2024CASE SHcourse
  MSCH-F 326 Authorship in the Media
  Credits
  3
  Prerequisites
  None
  Description
  Topic varies: in-depth analysis of directors, producers, or creative individuals in the media, viewed as 'authors.'
  Repeatability
  May be repeated with a different topic for a maximum of 6 credit hours.
  Summer 2025CASE AHcourse
  
  Spring 2025CASE AHcourse
  
  Fall 2024CASE AHcourse
  MSCH-F 375 Race, Gender, and Representation
  Credits
  3
  Prerequisites
  None
  Description
  Construction of race and gender identities across a range of media. Emphasis on the power of sound/image representations to shape and contest ideas about race and gender. Topic varies.
  Repeatability
  May be repeated with a different topic for a maximum of 6 credit hours in CMCL-C 412, JOUR-J 375, or MSCH-F 375.
  Summer 2025CASE SHcourse
  
  Spring 2025CASE SHcourse
  
  Fall 2024CASE SHcourse
  MSCH-F 392 Media Genres
  Credits
  3
  Prerequisites
  None
  Description
  Topic varies. Analysis of typical genres, such as westerns, situation comedies, documentaries, etc. Problems of generic description or definition: themes, conventions, iconography peculiar to given genres.
  Repeatability
  May be repeated with a different topic for a maximum of 6 credit hours in CMCL-C 392 and MSCH-F 392.
  Summer 2025CASE AHcourse
  
  Spring 2025CASE AHcourse
  
  Fall 2024CASE AHcourse
  MSCH-F 398 National and Transnational Cinemas
  Credits
  3
  Prerequisites
  None
  Description
  Historical survey of major national cinemas. Subject varies. Topics include Brazilian cinema, British cinema, Chinese cinema, French National cinema, German film culture, Indian cinema, and Italian cinema.
  Repeatability
  May be repeated with a different topic for a maximum of 6 credit hours in CMCL-C 398 and MSCH-F 398.
  Summer 2025CASE AHcourse
  
  Spring 2025CASE AHcourse
  
  Fall 2024CASE AHcourse
  MSCH-F 420 Topics in Media History
  Credits
  3
  Prerequisites
  None
  Description
  Media historiography, topics in national media history, national and international movements and trends. Topic varies.
  Repeatability
  May be repeated with a different topic for a maximum of 6 credit hours in CMCL-C 420 and MSCH-F 420.
  Summer 2025CASE SHcourse
  
  Spring 2025CASE SHcourse
  
  Fall 2024CASE SHcourse
2. Additional Elective. One (1) course:
  - Additional course from the Media School Elective list above
  - AMST-A 200 Comparative American Identities
  - AAAD-A 222 Black Women Artists
  - AAAD-A 277 Images of Blacks in Films: 1903-1950s
  - AAAD-A 278 Contemporary Black Film
  - AAAD-A 330 African American Cinematic Experience
  - AAAD-A 430 The Cinema of Africana Women
  AMST-A 200 Comparative American Identities
  Credits
  3
  Prerequisites
  None
  Description
  Examines the formation of legal, social, cultural, and economic identities within the United States and within U.S.-controlled territories. Who counts as "American?" To what ends have citizens and non-citizens assumed, claimed, or refused "American" identity? This course employs a comparative frame in considering elite and subordinated classes (and/or genders, races, ethnicities, sexualities); institutional and countercultural forms of self-definition; official history and alternative acts of collective memory.
  Summer 2025CASE AHcourse
  
  Spring 2025CASE AHcourse
  
  Fall 2024CASE AHcourse
  
  Summer 2025CASE DUScourse
  
  Spring 2025CASE DUScourse
  
  Fall 2024CASE DUScourse
  AAAD-A 222 Black Women Artists
  Credits
  3
  Prerequisites
  None
  Description
  Examines black female creativity in the United States from colonial times through the present. Studies art and creativity under slavery, nineteenth-century pioneering artists, racial and gender stereotypes in visual culture, the Harlem Renaissance, WPA art, civil rights and Black Power movements, feminist art, abstraction, conceptual and performance art, vernacular art, postmodernism, and black feminist futurism.
  Summer 2025CASE AHcourse
  
  Spring 2025CASE AHcourse
  
  Fall 2024CASE AHcourse
  
  Summer 2025CASE DUScourse
  
  Spring 2025CASE DUScourse
  
  Fall 2024CASE DUScourse
  AAAD-A 277 Images of Blacks in Films: 1903-1950s
  Credits
  3
  Prerequisites
  None
  Description
  Images of blacks in films, mainly American, from before "The Birth of a Nation" (1915) to the 1950s. Course will include segments as well as complete feature films (also "race films" when available), shorts, cartoons, and documentaries viewed in historical perspective.
  Summer 2025CASE AHcourse
  
  Spring 2025CASE AHcourse
  
  Fall 2024CASE AHcourse
  AAAD-A 278 Contemporary Black Film
  Credits
  3
  Prerequisites
  None
  Description
  Problems raised by proliferation of films acted, authored, directed, and/or produced by blacks. Exploration of legitimacy of "black film aesthetic" and its reception by various segments of the black community.
  Summer 2025CASE AHcourse
  
  Spring 2025CASE AHcourse
  
  Fall 2024CASE AHcourse
  AAAD-A 330 African American Cinematic Experience
  Credits
  3
  Prerequisites
  None
  Description
  Examines the historical and contemporary portrayals of African Americans in Hollywood and in independent narrative film focusing on the social and political functions of film, its legitimization of race, and its oppositional formations, interventions, and practices. Considers how film mediates and interrogates race and social relations in American society.
  Summer 2025CASE AHcourse
  
  Spring 2025CASE AHcourse
  
  Fall 2024CASE AHcourse
  AAAD-A 430 The Cinema of Africana Women
  Credits
  3
  Prerequisites
  None
  Description
  Historical and critical overview of films produced by African American women from the 1940s to the present. The course emphasizes how black women filmmakers combine their creative abilities with a desire to capture dominant issues that affect black women's lives in America.
  Summer 2025CASE AHcourse
  
  Spring 2025CASE AHcourse
  
  Fall 2024CASE AHcourse
Minor GPA, Hours, and Minimum Grade Requirements.
1. At least 9 credit hours in the minor must be completed in courses taken through the Indiana University Bloomington campus or an IU-administered or IU co-sponsored Overseas Study program.
2. At least 9 credit hours in the minor must be completed at the 300–499 level.
3. Except for the GPA requirement, a grade of C- or higher is required for a course to count toward a requirement in the minor.
4. A GPA of at least 2.000 for all courses taken in the minor—including those where a grade lower than C- is earned—is required.
5. Exceptions to minor requirements may be made with the approval of the department's Director of Undergraduate Studies, subject to final approval by the College of Arts and Sciences.