Courtney Moffett-Bateau

Alumni
E-mail: cmbateau@gmail.com

Profile: Native Detroiter Courtney Moffett-Bateau completed her high school education in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Shortly thereafter she began her studies at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, where she would eventually graduate with a dual degree in Philosophy and Black Studies.
During her junior year of college, she was awarded the Urban Fellowship by the Center for California Cultural and Social Issues (CCCSI). She has also worked as a research assistant for the book projects The Vinyl Ain't Final: Hip Hop and the Globalization of Black Popular Culture (by Sid Lemelle and Dipa Basu) and Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop (by Adam Bradley).
In 2008, she was awarded the Fulbright Grant and came to Oberhausen, Germany, in order to fulfill her fellowship as an English-teaching assistant at the Heinrich Boell Gesamtschule. After her grant was extended for a second year, she worked at the Elsa Brandstroem Gymnasium in Oberhausen, Germany. At this time she began studying for a joint Masters degree in Post-Colonial Studies and Philosophy at the University of Duisburg-Essen. She transferred to the University of Muenster in 2010 and will graduate with a Masters of Arts degree in National and Transnational Studies at the end of the 2011 winter semester.


Current research project:
M.A. thesis on
“Black Beauty Aesthetics: Combating American Beauty Constructions of the Past With Art of the Present” (working title)
In my thesis, I would like to unanimously tackle the two worlds of both art and literature in order to read the various artworks of Renee Cox, Kara Walker and Wangechi Mutu as visual texts of a complicated and ongoing commentary on accessing nation and identity through a critique of the aesthetically beautiful. By using the artworks of three African-American women, my thesis works to evaluate the way in which Black women’s bodies have been policed or regulated as a way of denying them access to nation or self-agency.

Throughout the American national landscape, the significance of white female beauty has held a social and political meaning within the American nation. The white female body has not only been long hailed as the classic female embodiment of American national space but also as director of moral signs. In the last 40 years, however, efforts in promoting black female beauty have been made in order to positively re-define blackness against white female beauty. Nevertheless white female beauty continues to be ingrained as most representative of the American national landscape within both literary and visual American texts.

In my thesis, I present the artworks of three African-American female artists in order to renegotiate black female beauty within American-Western space. I argue that the actively constructed visual nations of these artists provide them the space to threaten the mystical nature of whiteness, American empire and illusion. Each woman accomplishes this by re-visiting the past and witnessing the violent, ideological war crimes committed against black woman subjects within American historical spaces. By acknowledging black subjects within the often-neutralized spaces of whiteness, white American histories and storytelling, these three artists are able to confront the present state of mental scarring under which black American women are currently fighting through their own visual rebellion.



Conferences:
"Diversity Workshop" for English-teaching assistants at the Annual Fulbright Conference in Berlin, Germany, 2011 (panelist and chair)
“Transcending Diaspora: Whiteness, Performativity and the Politics of the Body,” University of Münster, Germany, 2010 (volunteer student assistant in the organizing team)
"Diversity Workshop" for English-teaching assistants at the Annual Fulbright Conference in Berlin, Germany, 2010 (panelist)
The Intercollegiate Department of Black Studies Annual Conference, Claremont Colleges in Claremont, CA, 2004-2008 (member of the organizing team)