AP/ANTH 2130 6.00 Anthropology Through the Visual: Images of Resistance/Irresistible Images
NOTE: This is a SUMMER term course.
Course Director (Summer term): Z. Hirji – zhirji@yorku.ca
Drawing upon images produced by anthropologists, journalists, filmmakers, photographers, artists, and activists this course asks questions about how the visual continually challenges and shapes understandings of self, community and other. This course uses ethnography, film, video, visual art, photography and new media to explore issues of race, ethnicity, nationality, globalization, power, authority, politics, religion, gender, class, and sexuality. Students will look at a number of these issues by exploring the visual worlds and vibrant visual life of the city of Lisbon and its people. In 2024 we will critically explore four intersecting visual landscapes of Lisbon:
I) Moor/Muslim/Migrant: This landscape explores the diversity of Lisbon’s histories using the Portugal’s Al Andalusian past as a case-study, and the ways
in which these pasts percolate in present-day conversations about religion, race, and immigration.
II) Discoveries/Domination/Decolonization: This landscape explores aspects and impulses of Portuguese imperialism, colonialism, and conquest in Africa, Asia, and South America, particularly the ways they shaped the formation of Lisbon, and how ideas about these histories continue to shape Portuguese imaginaries at home and abroad.
III) State/Street/Saudade: This landscape explores the introspective and street-level experiences of Lisbon and Lisbonites as articulated by Fernando Pessoa and others, as well as the emergence of Portuguese urbanity and modernity in the 20th century.
IV) Revolution/Resistance/Radical Imagination: This landscape explores the emergence of modern-day Portugal though acts resistance to dictatorship and fascism into an international and globalized world as well competing narratives about Lisbon, Portuguese identity, and Portuguese futures in the European and global contexts.
Note: this is a Study Abroad course requiring enrolment permission. Please visit this page or contact studyabr@yorku.ca for more information.
NOTE: NOT CURRENTLY OFFERED
How are images a form of communication? How do photographs, political cartoons, memes and visual art embody social meaning and interaction? In this course, students are introduced to a variety of visual forms of representation including, but not limited to films, advertisements, public art, cartoons, graphic novels, and social media to understand how the visual conveys cultural lives and experiences. We will start with the politics of representation and authority, particularly who is made visible, who is rendered invisible, and who is occluded in visual representations. We will address anthropology’s role in othering and objectifying various groups of people. Then, we will untangle the relationship between public memory, “truth”, and “cancel culture” and the conditions that contextualize the production and defacement of national monuments and memorials. We will unpack how and why movies, street art, graffiti, and other visual technologies produce, and are produced by meaning, fantasy, and desire of and for various publics. In the later section of the course, we will cover the potential of anthropology as research creation by assessing the discipline’s visual methods for ethnographic documentation. We will conclude by discussing how certain groups, such as Idle No More and Black Lives Matter, are creating political interventions through social media and gaining traction as political social movements.