Topics in Lusophone Cultures (396-0-1)

Topic

Portuguese to Iberian.

Instructors

Alexandra Cook

Meeting Info

Kresge Centennial Hall 2-430: Tues, Thurs 9:30AM - 10:50AM

Overview of class

Objects of Power: African Art and the Iberian Colonial Record

When Europeans began to encircle the African continent with their merchants and their missionaries, they struggled to define African religious and political systems in the abstract and often stuck to what they could see: objects and the rituals that surrounded them, which they often called "idols", "fetishes", and instruments of witchcraft. Some of these objects resemble the artworks that populate African collections in museums today, others are non-extant or have eluded the category of artwork entirely. Still other objects from these early periods have achieved canonical status as artworks without ever making it into the written record. In this course we will study the history of early Iberian colonialism and trade in Atlantic Africa through a corpus of heavily contested objects as they appear on and off the written record, with a focus on Ibero-African worlds. Each object studied presents a different theory of power, a different configuration of forces seen and unseen, and a different case for thinking about the interwoven politics of record-making and artmaking. Taught in English.

Learning Objectives

-Analyze the formal, stylistic, and technical characteristics of African artworks across media (e.g., Kongo nkisi, Luso-African ivories, lost-wax casting, sacred writing) in relation to their pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial contexts.

-Analyze the formal, stylistic, and technical characteristics of African and Afro-Atlantic artworks across media (e.g., Kongo nkisi, Luso-African ivories, lost-wax casting, sacred writing) in relation to their pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial contexts.

-Acquire fluency in current debates over museums, restitution, and the role of the art market and academia in shaping disciplinary hierarchies.

-Develop a research paper or creative project that synthesizes visual analysis with historical research to argue a novel interpretation of a specific artistic tradition or object

-Acquire a basic understanding of Iberian colonialism in Africa, Lusophone and Hispanophone African cultures past and present, and the formation of the Black Atlantic religious and material cultures.

-Develop skills for formal analysis of visual and material culture, learn how to conduct object-driven analysis

Class Materials (Required)

All class materials will be available on Canvas.

Class Attributes

Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area