Ways of Seeing

Catalog description

This course concerns the racial and cultural debates that have come in the wake of centuries of conquest, colonialism, postcoloniality, and cultural mixing of all kinds, as reflected in the cinema, the media, and popular culture generally. The course transnationalizes issues that are too often seen only in a narrow national frame of the U.S. All the debates about (the much censured) Critical Race Theory, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, White Supremacy, indigenous genocide and discrimination are transnational debates which go at least as far back as Columbus and the Conquest of the Americas. The course examines how these issues have been apprehended through a number of national histories and traditions, and how all those debates are refracted in film, media and popular culture.