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Art
History 354 |
| "Cross-Cultural
Arts around the Atlantic Rim" takes its name from the Atlantic Ocean,
that body of water traversed by slave ships in the Middle Passage that continues
to connect Europe, Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean in a circuit
of transverse influence. By taking its name and its outline not from a land
mass but from the fluid boundary and conduit of the ocean, the Atlantic
model allows us to trace the interdependence of what have been artificially
and problematically separated into such binaries as "Western"
and "Non-Western." In his critical response to ethnocentric and
nationalistic models of culture, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double
Consciousness (1993), sociologist Paul Gilroy calls for an approach
to cultural studies that would account for the ways in which slavery, colonization
of the Americas and the Caribbean, and the transatlantic movement of peoples,
goods, artifacts, and ideas shaped the formation of what we call "modernity."
This undergraduate lecture course takes off from Gilroy's proposal that
we consider the Atlantic "as one single, complex unit of analysis in
our discussions of the modern world." In our study of the networks
of exchange around the Atlantic, we will explore what happens when we "use
the model of the Atlantic to produce an explicitly transnational and intercultural
perspective." The first unit of the course is dedicated to two broad
goals: developing critical tools of analysis that allow us to talk about
cross-influence and hybridity and to introducing the ways in which key aspects
of visual culture from mapping and landscaping to painting and printmaking
are inseparable from the history of empire-building and slavery and yet
have also been used as tools of resistance. The second unit focuses on the
importance of the graphical text, cartoon avatars, performed stereotypes,
and changeable trickster figures in the Americas for the production of counter-normative
and doubled or hybrid identities, for the retelling of history, and for
survival in the face of genocide. We consider the inter-relation of such
seemingly diverse works as the illustrated chronicle of colonial Peru by
Guaman Poma de Ayala and the contemporary version, the Codex Espangliensis,
by Guillermo Gómez-Peña, the comic book (super)heroes appropriated
and resignified in such diverse works as the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat
and Jaune Quick-to-see-Smith, and the graphic tale Maus by Art Spiegelman.
The third unit addresses a set of tough, ongoing questions about how we
value and judge, about the roles of multi-media and installation arts, cinema,
and the institution of the museum in forming identities in relation, for
example, to particular versions of the past, about the representation of
the body, family, and land in the construction and contestation of the "normative"
and the "deviant" or the "minority," and about the political
uses of visual practices to transfigure everyday social conditions of injustice,
waste, and shame.
P: Sophomore standing |