Professor Jill Casid will be teaching ART HIST 130 “Seeing Race: Anti-Racism + Visual Culture” TR 11:00–11:50AM during the Spring 2023 semester.
No Prerequisites | Humanities Breadth | L&S credit | Ethnic Studies | Comm B Option
Register here: https://enroll.wisc.edu/search?term=1234&subject=180
“If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”
– James Baldwin, “The Black Scholar Interviews James Baldwin” (1973)
Description: Confronting how images work to shape ways of seeing race, this introduction to visual cultures tracks how power works through the visual—from visual surveillance and racial profiling to anti-racist visual activism. The course trains critical understanding of the role of imaging in producing ways of seeing race in its intersections with gender, sexuality, and ability. Through critical consideration of the spectacle of racialized violence and the everyday micro-aggressions of the stereotype, the course addresses the ways that images harm. But it also considers how just representation may offer restitution and repair. It explores forms of anti-racist visual activism that seize the power to look back. And it questions the ethics of an assumed right to look and to take an image. In asking these imperative ethical and political questions about what images do, the course trains the critical capacity to harness and intervene in the powers of imaging.