Where art historians have been long occupied by exchanges, migrations, and mobilities across the Atlantic, the objects and people moving across the Pacific has received far less attention. This seminar explores recent scholarship surrounding the "Pacific Century" in order to consider how the paradigm of the transpacific and thinking oceanically offer new ways of approaching art history. The transpacific intertwines two narratives: the Pacific as a space of expansionism and imperialism, and the Pacific as a zone of alternative alliances and cooperation. Engagements across the Pacific have been formed by European, Japanese, and American imperialism that continue to the present day, but horizontal and vertical contacts enabled by the Pacific have also offered other possibilities for postcolonial, decolonial, and deimperial imaginaries through alignments among Asia, Africa, and Latin America and movements that sought to articulate new forms of liberation, internationalism, and world revolution. Readings will be broadly interdisciplinary, drawing from Pacific studies, Asian studies, and American studies, to envision the future of transpacific art history. Topics include diasporic architecture, colonial modernisms, socialist internationalism and realism, Third World solidarity after Bandung, Cold War abstraction and postwar avant-gardes, and contemporary ecopoetics of the ocean.
Open to Graduate students only. Where art historians have been long occupied by exchanges, migrations, and mobilities across the Atlantic, the objects and people moving across the Pacific has received far less attention. This seminar explores recent scholarship surrounding the ?Pacific Century? in order to consider how the paradigm of the transpacific and thinking oceanically offer new ways of approaching art history. The transpacific intertwines two narratives: the Pacific as a space of expansionism and imperialism, and the Pacific as a zone of alternative alliances and cooperation. Engagements across the Pacific have been formed by European, Japanese, and American imperialism that continue to the present day, but horizontal and vertical contacts enabled by the Pacific have also offered other possibilities for postcolonial, decolonial, and deimperial imaginaries through alignments among Asia, Africa, and Latin America and movements that sought to articulate new forms of liberation, internationalism, and world revolution. Readings will be broadly interdisciplinary, drawing from Pacific studies, Asian studies, and American studies, to envision the future of transpacific art history. Topics include diasporic architecture, colonial modernisms, socialist internationalism and realism, Third World solidarity after Bandung, Cold War abstraction and postwar avant-gardes, and contemporary ecopoetics of the ocean.
Permission is required for interchange registration during the add/drop period only.
