Race and National Mythologies in American Art and Visual Culture

Catalog description

How does American art and visual culture implicitly and explicitly reify notions of America as a "white" nation, and how has this changed over time? How have images shaped and been shaped by historic moments of racially-implicated upheaval or conflict (e.g. Westward Expansion; the abolition movement, the Civil War and Emancipation; periods of mass immigration)? How has the idea of what it means to be "American" been defined against the racialized images of American "Others"? Can contemporary artists of color successfully appropriate and re-deploy racist imagery? This seminar considers these and other questions in investigating constructions and representations in American art and visual culture from the 16th century to the present. We will explore the ways in which these images are implicated as both products and producers of fundamental mythologies about the United States as a nation and about what it means to be "an American" (and who gets to be one). (Counts as Capstone)