This fall Professor Preeti Chopra will be teaching ART HIST 621/800 | ASIAN 621 Mapping, Making, and Representing Colonial Spaces on M 4:30–7:00 PM. Senior or Graduate Standing | Humanities Breadth | L&S Credit | Instructor Consent to Enroll Required.
Description: The spatial legacy of colonialism continues to live with us in the present. It plays a role in molding the postcolonial spaces of the future, both in former centers of colonial rule (such as London, Paris) and also in former colonies (such as India, Vietnam). “Colonialism” is often used to describe a very specific type of cultural and material exploitation that accompanied the territorial expansion of Europe across much of the world over the last 400 years. This graduate and advanced undergraduate seminar explores several important ways in which the population, landscape, architecture, and urban environment of these territories were mapped, made, and represented, particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries. Our primary settings will be territories under British colonial rule. Topics to be considered include: the mapping of newly colonized territories; hybridity; urbanism; colonialism and photography. Emulating the geographical spread of colonialism, theoretical and empirical analyses will travel across diverse disciplinary and spatial terrain, drawing on works in art, architectural and urban history, cultural studies, anthropology, and critical human geography.