Comparative Studies in Latin American and/or Iberian Literature & Cultures (455-0-1)
Topic
The Right To Look - Photography & Racial & Gender
Instructors
Maria Alejandra Uslenghi
847/467-1713
3-113 Crowe
Meeting Info
Parkes Hall 215: Mon 2:00PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
This seminar engages as a point of departure with Derrida's reflections on photography in Droit de regards 1985 (Right of Inspection) and his engagement with Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes — two key philosophers of the image in the 20th century— to interrogate photography, photographic practices and photographic archives in their role as constitutive forms of contemporary regimes of visibility. We will explore photography and representation — its singular capacity to relate to the real and instituting truth claims—; photography and memory, material trace and the politics of archives; photography and inscription, death and practices of mourning; photography and techné, repetition and dissemination, and the ways in which photography works to open itself to alterity and non-self-identity. Working through conceptual account as well as closely reading photographic images, we reflect on this medium as conditioning our access to contemporary aesthetic experience and its ethicopolitical futurity. A fundamental question we explore throughout: If Aesthetics has historically been the realm of thought where universalizing claims of political and self-determined subjecthood posed the threshold of the human subject in and of their representation, how have unfreedom, subjection, and social injustice have administered visibility and recognition? What conceptual instrument contemporary thinking of photography and photographic practices provide us to de-naturalized the way these regimes have taught us to see.
Readings will include, with those mentioned above: Allan Sekula, Harun Farochi, Vilem Flusser, Deborah Willis, Kaja Silverman, Eduardo Cadava, Shawn Michelle Smith and the photographic corpus will encompass historical and contemporary, Latin America and American photography with special focus on Latinx photographers.
Class Materials (Required)
All course materials will be available on Canvas.
Enrollment Requirements
Enrollment Requirements: Please contact the department of Spanish & Portuguese to request a permission number, spanish-portuguese@northwestern.edu.