Visual Cultures of Africa

4 credits · Undergraduate

Rather than follow a master chronology that would attempt to contain Africa's multiple cultural formations in a single narrative, this course will introduce students to African art through an investigation of a range of aesthetic traditions and movements across sub-Saharan Africa that are meaningfully reinvigorated in contemporary artistic production and popular visual culture. Our continual return to the cultural politics of the present will provide an anchor and roadmap for our inquiry; we will see contemporary visual culture as staging interventions that push at Western ideas of "primitive African tradition," while bringing to the fore conventions that, when tracked, reveal alternative traditions legible within an art historical context.