Visual Transculture

Art History 600/800

"Europe is literally the creation of the third world." With this declaration Frantz Fanon re-orders the relation between Europe and other parts of the globe. This course takes this statement, and particularly its import for the so–called "new world" of the Americas, as a productive provocation to call into question histories of art that tell a story of one-way influence. We will consider such theoretical work in what has come to be known as "postcolonial studies" that shakes up received notions of order in space and time between a postcolonial present and a colonial past, between new worlds and old, and between Latin America and el norte (the North). This seminar has been organized around re-consideration of Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz's new term "transculturation." Ortiz introduced this term in Cuban Counterpoint (1947), his contrapuntal study of how culture is born of contacts.

"Transculturation" was coined as a way to think outside of the bind of colonial modes of history writing that intentionally or unwittingly maintain the imperial fiction that art, aesthetics, and technologies moved from a center to a periphery without transformation and not the other way round. The concept of "transculturation" stirs up questions about how we understand the artifacts located as emerging from areas often marked off as zones of colonization and encounter within the Americas. But the "trans" or "cross" in transculture also importantly alerts us to the necessity of reviewing the cultures of Europe and the United States as produced by the very imitations and appropriations of contact displaced onto the periphery as "imitative." The reader brings together essays from a variety of fields that will help us think about how to describe transformational contacts, mixing, syncretism, and hybridization in the visual culture of the Americas.

While the case studies discussed in class will focus on physical and temporal crossings between Europe and the Americas and across the Americas, topics for final projects are not geographically or temporally restricted. Final projects will be exercises in translating and transporting between the theoretical essays discussed in class and an "object" or set of objects that could vary as widely as, for example, eighteenth-century caste painting (las castas) produced in Mexico or New Spain for collections in metropolitan Spain, the paintings of Cuban modernist Wilfredo Lam, sacred arts of Haitian Vodou in New York or New Orleans, or a contemporary film such as Amistad or Mission to Mars. No prior familiarity with postcolonial theory or the arts of the Americas is required.