Un/Making History

Catalog description

"There is that great proverb," the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe once said, "that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter." Is history inevitably written by the winners? Who decides which stories are told and heard, or how they shape collective memory? Can artists effectively act as historians, with the agency to shape counter narratives? This course explores contemporary art that draws on documentary and archival material - the stuff of "history" - to create performance, films and installations that tell stories otherwise lost, forgotten, suppressed or displaced. Special attention is paid to how these stories may participate in the process of decolonization, shape understandings of postwar realities, and generate debates in the global art world and society at large. Through artist and curator talks, screenings and virtual exhibition visits, students engage with the work of artists from Japan, South Asia, and Southeast Asia who explore the mechanisms of postcolonial history at the intersection of fiction and nonfiction, poetry, and testimony. Texts include work by Spivak, Hobsbawm, Césaire, Butalia, Chakrabarty, and Prashad.