Postcolonial Art and Exhibitions

Catalog description

This course will familiarize you with postcolonial art and theory through a global history of exhibitions from 1989 to the present. The "postcolonial" is imbricated with a host of important discourses and concepts: agency, alterity, ecofeminism, hybridity, dislocation, multiple modernities, neo-colonialism, orientalism, and globalization (to name only a few). In order to gain a firm grasp of these ideas, each week we will engage a formative exhibition dealing with postcolonial issues ( beginning with Jean-Hubert Martin's "Magiciens de la terre" at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris from 1989, one of the first displays to critique Western ethnocentrism in art). This exhibition history is inherently global and we will, broadly speaking, travel from Latin America to Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Accompanying these weekly exhibition case studies will be readings in postcolonial theory by influential thinkers, including Homi Bhabha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Edward Said, Okwui Enwezor, Franz Fanon, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, among others. Each student will work on a seminar paper researching an exhibition of their choosing, which they will present to the class at the end of the semester.