The Art of Revolution

Undergraduate / Graduate

This interdisciplinary course introduces theories of aesthetics and politics within the realms of popular culture, art, and revolutionary praxis. Traversing theatre, film, literature, visual art, dance, and music, it examines debates about revolutionary art that emerged within anticolonial struggles for national liberation, left political movements, and agitations against fascism, patriarchy, race and caste in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. How do capitalism and allied systems of domination attempt to control creative life? How have radical movements theorized cultural consumption and production, or grappled with representing vs. shaping reality? What is the role of the artist in times of revolutionary ferment? We will address these questions and more, as well as themes of audiences, sensuous life, revolutionary subjectivity, and utopian futures in contexts that include FRELIMO choral songs in Mozambique, Brecht's epic theatre, the cinema of the Cuban revolution, and the graffiti art of the Arab Spring. Students can expect to read widely, make weekly Canvas posts, and have the option of creating their own revolutionary art as a final project.