ARTH 448 Advanced Seminar in Art and Film: The Hallucinogenic Imagination

• Tuesdays, 8:45-11:30 am
• Instructor: Randolph Jordan

This course examines the long-standing but often overlooked influence of hallucinogenic experience on films and art. Western culture is currently in the midst of a resurgence of scientific interest in the medicinal uses of hallucinogenic substances after decades of criminalization and centuries of ostracization, paralleled by an increasing mainstream acceptance reflected by the success of popular media like the documentary Fantastic Fungi (2019). The moment is ripe for considering what these changing attitudes can tell us about cultural transformation in recent decades, and the role of art as both instigator and mirror of this transformation. The course is geared around two central questions: why has discussion and use of hallucinogenic substances been taboo in so many societies around the world, and why is that changing now? The reading and viewing material selected for this course engages with shifting attitudes towards hallucinogens in varying cultural contexts, historical periods, and genres spanning Europe, Asia, North America, and the First Nations. The course follows several key lines of inquiry through this material, including: colonial suppression and appropriation of Indigenous knowledge; feminist ecology; and the relationship between 1960s countercultures and artistic expression. These areas are investigated through an interdisciplinary framework drawing on ethnographies of hallucinogenic plant use across cultures; environmental philosophy; postcolonial art history; and analyses of psychedelic art and film. Students will come away from the course with new critical tools for understanding the intersection of historical, aesthetic, social, and political contexts in which engagements with hallucinogenic experience are shaped.