Prof. Giulia Paoletti (University of Virginia)
gp5mt@virginia.edu
In his 1972 influential book Ways of Seeing, John Berger writes that “seeing comes before words:” the child sees before it can speak and through that act of seeing we “establish our place in the surrounding world” (7). Far from being neutral, the way we see is affected by what we know or what we believe. By the same token, every image is too, the embodiment of a way of seeing. This course aims at decolonizing vision by exploring theories and practices that decenter the Western gaze, experience and epistemology. Following an introduction on theories of vision as a physical and social act, the seminar will consider selected artworks, including sculptures, videos, photographs and paintings whose materialities and compositions reconfigure the relation between object and subject. The works of artists such as Arthur Jafa, Kehinde Wiley, Seydou Keïta, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye will be read vis-à-vis essays by John Berger, Susan Sontag, Teju Cole, bell hooks, Zadie Smith, and Krista Thompson, who will help us explore the ethics of looking and challenge us to embody alternative ways of looking at and writing about art.
Class 1: Introduction: Ways of Seeing
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London, New York: British Broadcasting Corporation, Penguin Books, 1972. (Chapter 1)
Jay, Martin. “Scopic Regimes of Modernity.” In Vision and Visuality, edited by Foster, Hall, Nachdr., 3–28. Seattle, 2009.
Ramaswamy, Sumathi. “Introduction: The Work of Vision in the Age of European Empires.” In Empires of Vision: A Reader, edited by Sumathi Ramaswamy and Jay, Martin, 1–24, 2014.
Class 2: Decolonizing Vision
Tuck, Eve, and K Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.
Nelson, Steven. “On Decolonizing Art History.” October A Questionnaire on Decolonization, no. 174 (2020): 89.
hooks, bell. “Theory as Liberatory Practice.” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 4, no. 1 (1991): 1–12.
Class 3: Ethics of Looking: What does it mean to look at this?
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. (Chapter 3) Cole, Teju. “Death in the Browser Tab.” The New York Times Megazine On photography (2015).
Class 4: Opacity and Shine: Alternative Scopic Regimes
Pinney, Christopher. “Notes from the Surface of the Image.” In Photography’s Other Histories, edited by Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson, 202–20. Durham [N.C.] ; London: Duke University Press, 2003.
Smith, Zadie. “A Bird of Few Words: Narrative Mysteries in the Paintings of Lynette Yiadom- Boakye.” New Yorker, 2017, 48–53.
Thompson, Krista. “The Sound of Light: Reflections on Art History in the Visual Culture of Hip-Hop.” The Art Bulletin 91 (n.d.): 481–505.