Ways of Seeing: The Arab World in Global Perspective

The course examines visual politics in contemporary MiddleEastern society and grapples with fundamental debates in the study of cultural politics and visual cultures of the Arab region in a global context. We will contextualise the region’s contemporary visual cultures within wider debates and scholarship on the construction of subjectivities, the distribution of power, the formation of identity and belonging, and culture and representation. Emphasis is on translation and reception in a global context and transnational frame by focusing on how states and security, conflicts and displacements, social movements and revolution, aesthetics, art and global media are linked, characterized, analyzed.