Critical Social Inquiry 0290 - Image, Icon, Object, Fetish

What do pictures want? Do they want to be looked at, loved, analyzed, comprehended, worshipped, reproduced, and weaponized or simply acknowledged as life forms that live in the minds of their beholders? What if they harbor a divine or satanic presence? What is the meaning constituted by their media and materialities? What is their power over the beholder? Do images ever die? How do objects become fetishes? How do colonization and racism destroy and change the meanings of images and objects? Case studies will include miracle working Byzantine icons; contact relics of the Virgin Mary; Kongolese minkisi or power figures; the emergence of the "male" as well as "modern" gaze that freezes and objectifies as well as the medieval "female" religious gaze that animates and worships; the politics of Renaissance perspective; an-iconic Islamic art; ephemeral wax figures; racialized imagery and the question of interiority. KEYWORDS:Visual Culture, Art, Colonialism, Religion, Atlantic

The content of this course deals with issues of Race and Power Students are expected to spend a minimum of 6-8 hours of work outside of class time per week