Department of Media, Culture, and Communication
MCC-UE 1403
Postcolonial Visual Culture
Course Description
Studying visual culture focuses on the emergence of vision as a special domain of
activity, and tells us “what it is to see, and what there is to see.” That is, the study of
visual culture clarifies how seeing is not a self-evident biological action, but also a
cultural process that we can criticize and compare.
Since vision in modernity became a crucial means of social and political regulation,
vision also came to express and reflect social hierarchies, e.g., between those who were
considered visually exemplary, and others, and between seers and seen. The experience
of formerly colonized populations, both within and without the west, hence became an
important resource for transcending the limits of hitherto prevailing visual culture.
Studies in postcolonial visual culture pose a more specific set of questions, e.g.,
* what is the relationship between the visible and the invisible?
* under what conditions does the boundary between the visible and the invisible shift?
* what are the different degrees of visibility that apply to different classes of objects and
persons?
* how do new forms of technological communication alter the relationship of different
forms of sense perception, one to the other, e.g., seeing vis-a-vis hearing and touching
etc.
* what new forms of visual culture arise when oppositional cultures remix dominant
discourses, e.g., as with the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street?
Required Books
About Looking, John Berger. Vintage 1992.
Boris Groys: Art Power. MIT Press, 2008.
Faisal Devji, Landscapes of the Jihad, Cornell University Press, 2005.
WJT Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of Images. 9/11 to the present. University of
Chicago Press, 2011.
These are available at the NYU Bookstore on Broadway. Other readings will also be
made available in article form.
Course Details
The course will require active participation, based on close reading of texts, presentations
in class, response papers written on key readings, and a final exam. At the end of the
course, students should be able to conduct sensible debates on core concerns of visual
culture in relation to media studies.
Course evaluation will be based on class attendance (10%), class presentations (15%),
responses to readings via Blackboard (20%), and a final research project (55%).
Course Readings will include:
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
Michael Chanan, “Outsiders: The Battle of Algiers and Political Cinema,” Sight and
Sound, June 2007.
Frantz Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” and “This is the Voice of Algeria,” in A Dying Colonialism.
Tr. Haakon Chevalier, New York: Grove Press, 1965.
David Prochaska, That Was Then, This Is Now: The Battle of Algiers and After, Radical
History Review, Issue 85 (winter 2003): 133–49.
William Pietz, “The "Post-Colonialism" of Cold War Discourse,” Social Text, No. 19/20.
(Autumn, 1988), pp. 55-75.
Nikhil Pal Singh, “Cold War Redux: On the “New Totalitarianism”,” Radical History Review,
Issue 85 (winter 2003): 171–81.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks Tr. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove
Press, 1967 (Ch 1-4).
Edward Said, Chapter 3, “Orientalism Now,” (Sections I, II and IV, i.e., except for Section III) in
Edward Said, Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1978.
Mallek Alloula, Colonial Harem. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
[excerpts]
Bunn, David, 1999. Morbid Curiosities, Mutilation, Exhumation and the Fate of South
African Colonial Painting. Transforming Anthropology. Volume 8 Numbers 1 & 2,: pp
39-53.
White on Black: Images of African and Blacks in Western Popular Culture
By Jan Nederveen Pieterse. Yale 1991.
Mark Poster, "Visual Media Studies," Journal of Visual Culture, Vol 1(1): 67-70.
Martin Jay, Interview on "The Visual Turn," Journal of Visual Culture, Vol 1(1): 87-92.
Class Projects:
Divided by historical period. Dominant,
subaltern, intermediate. Relationship between
the seen and the unseen.
Techniques of observation, of visibility, in a given context.
Sound culture vis-à-vis visuality.
POV: The Object’s Agency
As objects move around the world they produce their own histories, memories, scars; they leave
traces in their wake.
Choose an object—one of the ones discussed in the readings or another you are familiar with—
and take seriously the
idea that it is an active participant in this narrative. How does that change the
historical/political/legal implications for that
object?
A key aim of this class will be to inquire into the differences between visual cultures of
i) the pre-Cold War era, when the world was divided into “civilized” and “colonized”
ii) the Cold War era, when the world was divided into “free” and “totalitarian”
iii) 2001-2011, the time of “the Axis of Evil” when “Islamo-fascist” governments
replaced Communism as the threat facing the “free world;”
and
iv) the contemporary moment when for example, revolutionary Arab political movements
have provided inspiration for politics in the West as in the Occupy Wall Street movement
across the U.S.
This class proposes to examine these and related issues through the lens of postcolonial
visual culture.
More specific questions can be posed in light of the opening paragraph:
1. How were older modes of perceiving the west vis-à-vis its others successively altered –
if they were altered - in the wake of the cinema, television and the internet?
2. Are new media technologies repeating old stereotypes, or are they modifying them,
and if so, how?
3. What reflections can we notice of the war on terror, from documentary and feature
films (both in the US and elsewhere), to news shows such as Colbert Report and the
Daily Show, to Occupy Wall Street (which acknowledges the “revolutionary Arab
Spring” as its inspiration) and beyond?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street
http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters-blog/occupywallstreet.html
Jacques Ranciere, The Emancipated Spectator. Tr. Gregory Elliott. London and New
York: Verso Books, 2009.
The Wire
The Western
Youtube
Ads as a global phenomenon
Jazz Singer; the other within US visual culture
Steven Colbert and Jon Stewart; The other politics guy; Oprah Winfrey;
Mulholland Drive and the Latino within; Chinatown
Web design
Matrix; science fiction