11 - 20 of 246 results for: Literary history

From Sally Hemings to Michelle Obama and Beyonce, this course explores the ways that racial identity has been experienced, represented, and contested throughout American history. Engaging historical, legal, and literary texts and films, this course examines major historical transformations that have shaped our understanding of racial identity. This course also draws on other imaginative modes including autobiography, memoir, photography, and music to consider the ways that racial identity has been represented in American culture.

In this graduate seminar we will explore how writers draw from their worlds of experience to create humanistic works of broad 'and often urgent' appeal. We will pay special attention to how creative writers integrate details of history, kinship, community, identity, pain and imagined possibilities for justice with stories that carry the potential to far exceed the bounds of a particular cultural or geographical place. Our focus will be on how writers combine the personal with larger pressing issues of our times that invite us to breakout of the cloistered spaces of academia (a responsibility, a necessity and also an opportunity) to write for larger publics. We will read and take writing prompts from authors who explore themes akin to those we care about as anthropologists to limn connections between ethnographic telling and literary sensibilities. All of the texts and writing exercises will invite students to intellectually collaborate with writers on the ways they clarify, magnify or explode understandings of power, race, colonial trauma, uncertain futures and societal afflictions as well as how individuals and communities expose and remake the constraints that the modern world has bequeathed us. We will engage works across genres. Potential authors include Lucile Clifton, Natalie Diaz, David Diop, Ralph Ellison, Laleh Khadivi, Moshin Hamid, Zora Neale Hurston, Maaza Mengiste, Toni Morrison, Tommy Orange, Zitkala-Sa and Ocean Vuong. Enrollment requires consent of instructor.

An exploration of the visual arts of East and South Asia from ancient to modern times, in their social, religious, literary and political contexts. Analysis of major monuments of painting, sculpture and architecture will be organized around themes that include ritual and funerary arts, Buddhist art and architecture across Asia, landscape and narrative painting, culture and authority in court arts, and urban arts in the early modern world.

What do pictures reveal about individuals and their social, cultural, and historical world? Who or what might they conceal? This seminar uses visual depictions of Americans (paintings, photographs, films, comics, and more) as the starting point for discussions of American history, art, popular culture, social movements, and national identity, as well as questions of who has been represented and who has been overlooked. Literary and historical texts support and complement the close study of pictures from the late 19th century through the present.

How do historians, art historians, and literary historians of premodern Europe shape their research and their teaching around questions of race? How do current debates on race theory shape our perception of the past and deepen historical inquiry? This graduate colloquium focuses on the most recent publications on race in medieval and early modern studies to reflect on such questions while examining the challenges that race studies put on historical definitions, research methodologies, as well as teaching institutions.

The devastation of 1945 marked not only the end of a war but the collapse of entire ways of seeing, thinking, and creating. From the ruins emerged a generation of artists, writers, and thinkers who wrestled with a world that had been fundamentally altered. How could one depict reality after the World Wars? How could painting move forward after the obliteration of tradition? What forms could literature take when language itself had been shaken? This course explores how photography, painting, and literature responded to the rupture of war and genocide, forging new artistic and intellectual languages in the face of crisis. We will study the stark, haunting images of postwar photography that capture both destruction and resilience; the radical experiments of painters who abandoned inherited forms to create new modes of expression; and the philosophical and literary works that questioned the very foundations of meaning, while also gesturing toward new beginnings. Through these encounters, we will consider how art and thought in the postwar era navigated between despair and renewal, bearing witness to catastrophe while insisting on the necessity of creation.

An examination of many types of interactions between images and texts in Chinese painting. These include poetic lines inscribed on paintings (as response or as a theme given to the artist to paint), paintings that emulate or transform ancient poetic couplets, or illustrate poetic and literary narratives, and calligraphic inscriptions. Attention will be given both to comparative perspectives and to the special aesthetic and intellectual consequences that the conjunction of the literary and visual modes give to Chinese artistic expression. [Undergraduate enrollment with consent of one of the instructors.]

How did images maintain, construct, or transform political power during the conquest and colonization of Mexico? The creation and destruction of visual materials in this period had a complicated relationship with power. The pictographic codices that celebrated the expansive Aztec Empire were created after its fall; and the conquistadors' indigenous allies painted some of the most triumphalist narratives of the conquest. Friars accused indigenous peoples of "idolatry" both to justify the destruction of their images and objects, and to construct legal defenses of their humanity. Colonial authorities frequently claimed Afro-Catholic festivals were seditious. In light of such complexity, official histories that recount the top-down consolidation of royal and viceroyal power are suspiciously simple. What counter-narratives do images and other visual phenomena from this tumultuous period offer? This course introduces students to major texts from Colonial Mexico (royal chronicles, conquistadors' tales, letters, poems, festival accounts) alongside a fascinating trove of images (painted codices with Nahuatl texts, feather mosaics, and indigenous heraldry) and considers how experiences of images and spectacles were transformed into textual accounts ("ekphrasis" or the literary device of description). Taught in Spanish with accommodations for non-ILAC students who are still improving their language skills

This course will explore the different kinds of modernisms and modernities that Latin American artists and authors have produced from the early twentieth century to the present. Defined as a break with the past and with tradition, the term "modernism" in Latin America has signified specific transformations that speak to the continent's long history of colonialism and alleged marginality in relation to Europe and the United States. How have Latin American artistic and literary movements drawn from and broken with European modernisms and avant-gardes? What meanings of "tradition" and "modernity" emerge from their works, especially in their engagement with Indigenous and Afro-Latin American cultures? By examining artworks together with literary texts, we will address their aesthetic dimensions, as well as the socio-historical and political conditions that made them possible. Some movements may include Antropofagia (Brazil), Mexican Muralism, Surrealism, Indigenisms, Afro-Caribbean art and literature, Abstractionism, Neo-Concretism, and Tropicalia. Course content and discussions will be in English. ILAC/Spanish majors should take the course for 5 units and must do the readings and assignments in Spanish.