ARTH 615 Postcolonial and Decolonizing Practices in Art and Visual Culture

• Dr. Balbir Singh

In this seminar, we will study theoretical, visual, and cultural works by the global majority at the nexus of race, gender, sex, colonialism, and psychoanalysis. In taking the possibilities of anticolonial, Third World solidarity seriously, students in this class will read and engage diverse fields and schools of thought from anticolonial traditions, postcolonial theory, carceral studies, Black feminist theory, SWANA studies, psychoanalysis, and visual culture. In this way, our examination of visual art and archival materials from the mid-20^th century onwards, will be informed by thinkers that consider how anticolonialism had and continues to have a visual dimension that is structured by both conscious and unconscious desires for decolonization and liberation from the bonds of racial-colonial capitalism. Such desires are often violent, necessarily contending with a militant ethics and politics that decolonization and liberation require. Part of the way we will narrate these desires in our collective study will be through, on the one hand, selections from contemporary art and visual culture scholarship by Ariella Azoulay, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, David Lloyd, Salar Mameni, Nicholas Mirzeoff; and Fatima Rony; and on the other hand, selections from postcolonial and anticolonial work that intersects with psychoanalytic thought by Frantz Fanon, Ranjana Khanna, C. Heike Schotten, Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi, and Neferti Tadiar.