The Art and Politics of Psychedelia

Catalog description

This interdisciplinary, discussion-based seminar will introduce students to key concepts in cultural studies and critical theory by engaging the history, politics, and art of psychedelic drugs. We will trace the history of psychedelics and their aesthetic cultures from the mid-twentieth century to the present “psychedelic renaissance,” taking up psychedelia as a cultural and aesthetic formation popularized in the 1960s that has since traveled and evolved. We will critically analyze the theoretical frames through which psychedelic drugs have been imagined and discussed in science, politics, media, and popular culture. We will think through questions of freedom, bodily autonomy, consciousness, hedonism, political radicalism, capitalism, and labor. Throughout, we will consider how artists and writers have represented the supposed ineffability of ecstatic or transcendent experiences in art, performance, literature, and media.