Studies in 20th & 21st Century Art (460-0-3)

Topic

Arts of Asia and the Middle East: Modernism in the

Instructors

Hannah J Feldman

Rebecca Carol Johnson
847/467-1365
University Hall 225

Meeting Info

Block Conference Room: Wed 2:00PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

Focusing on transnational socialist art from the 1930s to the 1970s, this seminar de-centers modernism by following alternate axes of international cultural alliances that bypass the white Euro-American center. From the establishment of the Moscow-based Comintern arts section in the 1930s (see Comintern Aesthetics) to collaborations between the USSR and the Eastern Bloc with de-colonizing socialist nations in Africa in the 1960s and the non-aligned nations in the 1970s, as well as global Maoism (see Art, Global Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution), the seminar will take a workshop format to consider international, anti-colonialist and anti-racist socialist cultural production. We will also consider socialist axes within the USSR, including Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan (sites of Afro-Asian Writers' Conferences in 1958 and 1973) and Ukraine. The seminar will consider primary sources such as George Padmore, Pan-Africanism or Communism? (1956), Léopold Sédar Senghor, On African Socialism (1964) and Audre Lorde, "Notes from a Trip to Russia," and recent scholarship in this developing field such as Jonathan Flatley, "Picturing the World of the Communist Black International" (2021), Bogdan Popa, De-centering Queer Theory: Communist Sexuality in the Flow During and After the Cold War (2021), Rossen Djagalov From Internationalism to Postcolonialism (2020), and Sanjukta Sunderason, Partisan Aesthetics: Modern Art and India's Long Decolonization (2020). Our guiding questions will be: How did the modern art of international socialism look different, as well as function differently, from international modernism based in Euro-American market models? What is its afterlife in the present day?

Class Materials (Required)

Readings will be on Canvas.