ANT 285 - Special Stopic: Sinners

Using the film Sinners as a central text, students will explore ‘race’, Black cultural life, spirituality, music, folklore, kinship, community, violence, and resistance within the historical and cultural landscape of the American South. Through anthropological theories of culture, ritual, identity, power, and memory, students will consider how Sinners represents Black experiences while engaging broader questions about cultural survival, collective memory, freedom, belonging, and the sacred. The course places the film in conversation with ethnography, history, folklore, music, literature, and Black cultural theory. Here, Sinners, exists as both pop-culture entertainment and as a ‘site of memory’ where cultural meanings are created, contested, and transmitted.

Satisfies Anthropology major and minor requirement.