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This master’s seminar examines the role of the arts in tangibly exploring, shaping, and challenging ideas of racial difference. Motivated by colonial encounters and the later, widespread institution of chattel slavery in the Atlantic world, early modern Europeans and their American inheritors sought to materialize race: to ground social hierarchy in physical, bodily difference. This class thus seeks to build on existing iconographic approaches to racial construction by emphasizing the ways in which artistic materials and techniques were themselves deployed in projects of racial differentiation. We will analyze key techniques by which these essentializing efforts were made and disrupted: for example, ethnographic engravings, physiognomic profiles, tinted sculptures, and daguerreotypes. In doing so we will attend closely to the traffic between discourse and technique in order to explore the historical contingency of the meanings that are attached to qualities and things. We will investigate these questions through the close examination of both historical works and resonant contemporary works by artists like James Luna, Toyin Odutola, and Kara Walker, as well as through readings from art and cultural history, the study of science, technology, and society, critical race theory, and social anthropology.
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| Literatur |
Chaplin, Joyce. “Race.” _The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800_, edited by David Armitage and Michael Braddick, pgs. 173-90. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.; Fend, Mechthild. “Skin Colour [selection],” in _Fleshing Out Surfaces: Skin in French Art and Medicine, 1650-1850, _pgs. 143-167. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016.; Stephens, Michelle. “Introduction: Fleshing Out the Act [selection],”_Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male Performer,_pgs.1-10.Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.; Lehmann, Ann-Sophie. “The Matter of the Medium: Some Tools for an Art Theoretical Interpretation of Materials,” in _The Matter of Art: Materials, Techniques, Meanings, 1200-1700._ Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015, pgs. 21-41.; Bernstein, Robin. “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race.” _Social Text _27, no. 4 (2009): 67-94. |
