Middle Eastern Aesthetics

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

Post War & Contemporary Aesthetics in the Middle East and North Africa This course introduces students to the aesthetics of the Middle East and North Africa produced in the postwar era (i.e after 1945). Defined by a period of coups, anticolonial politics, postcolonial revolutions and wars that transformed the region both nationally and globally. Responding to these experiences of historical and psychic rupture, artists, writers, and filmmakers produced works that were at once experimental and avant-garde. The works discussed in this class will cut across genres and media, often disrupting a linear sense of time or realist representation of events. Through close-reading and group discussions, students will learn to analyze works for their formal innovation and draw connections between aesthetics and politics.