The Afro-Caribbean philosopher Frantz Fanon begins his seminal essay “The Fact of Blackness” (1952) by stating that “I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things […] and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.” As a new generation of digital natives moves the cultural pendulum ever closer towards an all-encompassing on-screen media consumption, visual discourses increasingly shape and structure our perspectives on social and cultural realities. While definitions of subjects and objects are rewritten in this process, new challenges and boundaries emerge. This seminar explores how visual discourses past and present impact understandings of race and ethnicity in the United States. We will ask how paintings, maps, photographs, films, material artifacts and other visual texts shape debates related to identity, objectification, representation, and power.
Through a series of case studies and accompanying readings, we will examine how race and ethnicity are constructed, negotiated, and contested in a variety of different forms. Topical focal points of the seminar include the aesthetic vocabularies of representation, the role of images in contexts of racial oppression, resistance, and liberation, the relationships between visual culture and social justice, as well as the possibilities and limitations of visual media as tools for political intervention. We will also consider the ways in which social media, digital technologies, and so-called artificial intelligence are impacting the consciousness and agency of minorities, and what these developments may mean for future politics of identity and representation.
- Trainer/in: Steffen Adrian Wöll