ARTH
575D:Writing Transnational Space – Tony King
In this
course, open to art history and other graduate students, we shall examine how
the spaces of transnational culture are being written, read, and critiqued as
well as imagined, built and inhabited. After a decade of debate, what do we
know about the production and consumption of "transnational" cultures
and spaces in (and out of) the so-called "global city"? Have
feminist, postmodernist, poststructuralist, postcolonial or other critiques
undermined or enhanced the possibilities of addressing "architecture and
culture in an age of globalization"? How far, and in what ways, are the
fantasies and imaginings of millenial time and global space impacting the
shape, form, and representations of cities and public culture worldwide? What
are the historical, theoretical and empirical presuppositions behind recent
texts on, e.g. "World music", "the novel and the globalization
of culture", "global transformations and the changing politics of
art", "cross-cultural consumption"? Is postcolonial criticism a
critique of globalization theories or part of them? Who benefits, who suffers,
from the powers of the "global gaze"? And where is it situated? In a
world of transnational cultural flows where do cultural borders exist? Are
questions about identity in visual, spatial, literary, and public cultures
being driven by the imperatives of a global cultural tourism? How are such
questions affecting the nature and production of knowledge? Where do such
cultural issues fit in a world of grossly uneven relations of power and development?
Addressing
various realms of public culture (visual, material, and sonic) - including
architecture, music, film, urban space - the course will draw on a selection of
readings from an interdisciplinary range of sources.
FORMAT; the
course will run as a participatory seminar requiring regular readings, reading
reports, presentations, and with the opportunity of developing short papers on
particular topics. The following books are recommended (on order at Barnes and
Noble):
Arjun
Appadurai (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Aspects of Globalization.
University of Minnesota Press.
Fredric
Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, eds. (1998) The cultures of Globalization. Duke
University Press.
Anthony D.
King, ed. (1997) Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary
Conditions for the Representation of Identity. University of Minnesota Press.
John Rennie
Short (2001) Global Dimensions: Space, Place and the Contemporary World.
Reaktion Books
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