Visual Culture

This course examines the role of visual culture in the history and contemporaryprocesses of globalization and global cultural flows. Exploring the concept of thevisual construction of the social field, the course compares the means by whichcultures visualize themselves and frame encounters with outsiders. The courseprovides a survey of contemporary theoretical engagements with culturalmemory, consumerism, and colonialism and decolonization, looking at the roleplayed by visual culture in changing concepts of national identity, globalization,and cultural politics. The course examines the tensions between the emergingidentities of transnationalism and globalization and the traditional frameworks ofnational memory and upon the role of visual culture in the unfolding developmentof globalization.