ARTH 570
Image-making, Orientalism and Visual Culture Spring 2021
Division I
This is not the current course catalog

Images enjoy extraordinary power in the spaces between self and other, human and divine. They play myriad roles–witness, surrogate, instigator, supplicant–and travel freely across political, religious and cultural boundaries. They are also subject to reproduction, alteration and destruction as disparate visual cultures interact and globalizing processes ensue. This course will focus on various regions–;e.g. United States, France, Turkey, and the Perso-Islamic sphere–and the images that factor in the intervening spaces, from 1800 to the present. We will begin with the theme of self-fashioning and the peculiar nature of portraiture. Thereafter, the entanglement of religious beliefs and visual traditions will broaden our inquiry, leading us to contested dynamics like iconoclasm and aniconism, and reductionist types like veiled women and pious men. Along the way, proliferating and palimpsestic forms of Orientalism will oblige us to consider the very concept of global visual culture. Students will submit weekly GLOW posts to foster class discussion and undertake a major research project over the course of the semester.