Visual Culture, Gender,
and Critical Race Theory

AAS 679

This course is a seminar that examines visual culture in relation to theories of vision, racialized discourse, modernism, and postmodernism. Racialized discourse permeates public and private spaces in visual codes that influence ways of "seeing" and negotiating human interaction. Cultural production is predicated, not only on imaginative creative thought, but also on a range of individual preconceptions and social values that are influenced by power relations. Its effect ranges from aesthetic appreciation to violence. This seminar provides a forum for examining the mutual imbrications of vision, visuality, cultural production in race in relation to presiding theories of natural and social science, and visual culture, including picture theory. The objective is to inquire into the ways in which pictures and texts, form and language produce knowledge and practice within a scopic regime where race, gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality and violence are mutually imbricated within the global landscape. Such an approach problematizes the notion of pure optical vision, and facilitates the examination of visual culture as encoded by theories and practice of race and gender. The investigation of forms, images, and prevalent theories of art, visual culture, and race will be explored through the texts of W. J. T. Mitchell, M. Foucault, Walter Benjamin, N. Stepan, D. T. Goldberg, F. Fanon, W. E. B. DuBois, H. Bhabha, P.Harris, bell hooks, Howard Winant, Martin Jay, Stephen Gould, and Deborah Willis, among others. The divergent backgrounds of these scholars indicate the interdisciplinary approach of the seminar.