Art and Politics

Instructors:  Kiran Lam-Saili and Jules Riegel
Meeting time: Monday, 12:15-2:45 pm
Canvas site

This course introduces students to scholarship on the intersections of art and politics in a global context, from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which “art” and “politics” are interconnected, challenging the idea of “art” as the domain of the elite and the idea of “politics” as something carried out in public. We will begin with the emergence of mass publics at the turn of the last century before turning to debates over art’s liberatory potential—and its appropriation in the hands of totalitarian, fascist, colonial, and imperial powers. Moving from fin-de-siècle Europe to the Soviet Union, from Cold War-era conflicts in Asia to the “post”-colonial Caribbean, we’ll consider how art can both uphold and challenge entrenched power. Throughout the semester, we’ll pair canonical texts with films, visual art, music, literature, and more. Students will learn foundational theories and methods used by literature scholars and historians to analyze art and politics.