ARTH 298 Special Topics in Genre Studies: LANDBACK: Nationalisms and the Landscape

• Tuesdays, 2:45-5:30 pm
• Instructor: Adrian Deveau

In 2019, Wet’suwet’en land defenders staged a barricade to stop the expansion of Coastal GasLink’s pipeline on ancestral, unceded land. The images of RCMP officers arresting land defenders transgressed the image of northern Canada as an uninhabited landscape, perpetuated by visual culture including the Group of Seven. Landscapes shape national aesthetics, including John Singer Sergeant’s Lake O’Hara and John Glover’s colonial paintings of lutruwita. The facade of an “empty landscape,” as challenged by the LANDBACK movement, is a myth. Employing the calls for LANDBACK, this course critically surveys global landscapes from the 16^th Century to the present. We will explore how landscape painting, national parks, cartography, borders, Dutch still life, protest posters, and drone surveillance systems both forge and erase nations through aesthetic representations of the land. Students will explore theories of the picturesque, nationalism, decolonization, Indigenous sovereignty, and LANDBACK, providing the tools for art historians to analyze and decolonize images of landscapes on a global scale.