Arts and Cultures of Modernity

Catalog description

This course explores the arts from the late17th/early18th-century to the post-World War II era, examining how they define and reflect both local cultural views and rapidly shifting global understandings of the world. The course considers how the diverse conceptions and conditions of modernity both shaped and were shaped by the arts around the world. Many of the issues pertinent to the course -- industrialization/urbanization; the dislocations, disasters, and opportunities that followed cross-cultural contact; colonialism, decolonization, conflicts of political ideology, and liberation struggles; fundamental redefinitions of mind, language, gender, and sexual identity -- have had very different effects in various parts of the world; instructors encourage students to explore what it means to study the arts from global perspectives and what "globalization" itself has meant and means in the context of the arts.