Re-Thinking Political Aesthetics: Beauty, Modernity, and Justice in the Americas

The United States and the Americas have always been spaces of intertwined artistic, political, and religious expression. Yet, in the growing field of political aesthetics, works of European modernism are prized while examples from the Americas are rarely mentioned. This course examines the philosophical texts used to frame the field of political aesthetics, as well as food in the colonial diet of New Spain, painting during the Civil War, photography and the New Negro movement, jazz and the Beat generation, and other case studies of American expression that engage, complicate and re-construct the relationship between art and politics.