Art History 729 - Problems in American Art

This course will focus upon the visual culture of slavery in Canada and the American North, drawing context from other temperate and tropical climate sites. Scholarship on slavery in Canada and the American North falls far short of the research that has been produced on the American South, the Caribbean, and northern South America. The same is also true for other northern or temperate climate regions ?Scotland, Denmark, Norway, and Argentina ? that became sites where enslaved minorities were forced to adapt to cold climates and where year-round agricultural economies could not be sustained. Indeed, slavery has come to be associated almost exclusively with tropical and semi-tropical planation economies. This course seeks to redress the academic neglect of slavery in temperate and northern regions by introducing students to the interdisciplinary field of Slavery Studies through the lens of art and visual culture and providing the tools for them to produce original scholarship.

This course will focus upon the visual culture of slavery in Canada and the American North, drawing context from other temperate and tropical climate sites. Scholarship on slavery in Canada and the American North falls far short of the research that has been produced on the American South, the Caribbean, and northern South America. The same is also true for other northern or temperate climate regions ?Scotland, Denmark, Norway, and Argentina ? that became sites where enslaved minorities were forced to adapt to cold climates and where year-round agricultural economies could not be sustained. Indeed, slavery has come to be associated almost exclusively with tropical and semi-tropical planation economies. This course seeks to redress the academic neglect of slavery in temperate and northern regions by introducing students to the interdisciplinary field of Slavery Studies through the lens of art and visual culture and providing the tools for them to produce original scholarship.