This course focuses on specific scenes of cultural cross-pollination and on how these encounters are reflected in the arts. Areas of investigation might include the Harlem Renaissance, French Surrealism in the Caribbean, Bollywood / Hollywood, Indigenous Hip-Hop, or contemporary Toronto as a convergence of creative energy. How have artists from marginalized communities taken up and adapted modes of expression for their own creative purposes? How can new forms of artistic representation contest and undermine systemic social and political inequalities? This course focuses on liberating aesthetic innovations that respond to historically embedded cultural encounters.