Semester:
Offered:
Sarah Lewis
This course is organized around a guiding question: How has visual representation both limited and liberated our definition of American citizenship and belonging? Today, as we are awash with images, and as social media has allowed us to witness racially motivated injustices with a speed unimaginable until recently, we have had to call upon skills of visual literacy to remain engaged global citizens. This course will allow us to understand the understudied historic roots and contemporary outgrowth of this crucial function of visual literacy for justice in American civic life.
Sequenced chronologically, the lectures are organized into three parts, examining the role of visual representation as Civic Evidence, as Civic Critique, and as Civic Engagement (i.e. movement building and solidarity). Exploring these three categories in turn, topics include: the role of aesthetics for the invention of race, narratives supporting and critiquing Native American "removal", the abolition of transatlantic slavery, immigration, the creation of and destabilization of U.S. segregation, the New Negro Movement, Japanese Internment, and the long Civil Rights movement. Each lecture centers on case studies to show the historic roots of the contemporary interplay between visual representation and justice at these inflection points in the contestation for citizenship in America.
This course takes a rights-based framework in approaching the categories of justice and citizenship in American civic life. Justice distributes a range of prized goods in civic life, but this course will focus on the distribution of rights as a form of justice. The rights of citizenship are many, but central to them all is the right, even the responsibility, to engage and participate in collective society, and to be recognized. The course will wrestle with the question of how and whether the foundational right of representation in a democracy, the right to be recognized justly, is indelibly tied to the work of visual representation in the public realm.
We are fortunate to have invaluable holdings at the Harvard Art Museums and at the Peabody Museum and via Cooper Gallery exhibitions that vividly showcase this contested relationship between art, justice, race, and culture over the course of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Lectures will incorporate material from these holdings and sections will meet at these locations to facilitate object-based study. This course will also include guest lectures from architect Michael Murphy and artist Theaster Gates. The aim of this course is for students develop rigorous skills of visual literacy and critical analysis foundational to be engaged global citizens regardless of their concentration or future field of study.