Critical Studies: Decolonize Now!

Catalog description

This course explores ways to "delink" artmaking and its history from the "colonial matrix of power." Examining critical discourses surrounding decoloniality, as well as post-coloniality, students will test and complicate foundational concepts such as hybridity, empire, migrant subjectivity, consciousness of the Borderlands, post-occidental reason, pluriversality, and transmodernity. Over the duration of the semester, students will be tasked to form a corroborated viewpoint of their own in relation to theoretical texts by Walter D. Mignolo, Frantz Fanon, Okwui Enwezor, Gloria Anzaldúa, Rey Chow, Hamid Dabashi, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Rob Nixon, Michael Hardt and Antoni Negri, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Paul Gilroy, and others. Artists under consideration may include H and #233;lio Oiticica, Walid Raad, Tavares Strachan, MLT Collective, John Akomfrah, Dahn Vo, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Lubaina Himid, Jimmie Durham, Jeannette Ehlers, Martine Gutierrez, Coco Fusco, Lorraine O'Grady, Judy Baca, and ASCO. Exhibitions such as The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain (1989-90), All the World's Futures, Venice Biennale (2015), Verboam and #233;rica (2017), Decolonizing Appearance (2018), Memories of Underdevelopment: Art and the Decolonial Turn in Latin America, 1960-1985 (2018), May You Live In Interesting Times, Venice Biennale (2019), The Warmth of Other Suns: Stories of Global Displacement (2019), and When Home Won't Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art (2019) are crucial in understanding the framework of this class. Remember Anzaldúa's words: Because I, a mestiza, continually walk out of one culture and into another, because I am in all cultures at the same time, alma entre dos mundos, tres, cuatro, me zumba la cabeza con lo contradictorio. estoy norteada por todas las voces que me hablan simult and #225;neamente.