Visual Cultures of Repair and Resistance

Catalog description

This seminar will explore the poetics and politics of cultural production that engages war, state violence, and intersecting social inequalities through processes of repair and resistance. Using methodologies of visual culture analysis, we will examine how images shape the political imagination, paying special attention to the politics of looking, witnessing, and (not) being seen. Addressing various historical and political contexts, we will focus on a few primary loci: Afrofuturism and what Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation” in the “afterlife of slavery”; acts of witnessing and speculation in Palestine-Israel; and transnational resistance to surveillance, drone warfare, and global networks of control.