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Seminar I: Reading
the American Landscape: Photography, Place, and Identity (Leaders:
Kevin DeLuca and Anne Demo) Nature
has long been understood to be unnatural. Raymond Williams, for example, characterized
it as "perhaps the most complex word in the language." The complexity
suggested by Williams is compounded when pairing nature with landscape. Interdisciplinary
studies of "natural landscapes" such as the pristine wilderness areas
of Yosemite and magisterial spaces of the American Southwest have well documented
the conjunction between landscape, myth, and identity. This seminar approaches
natural landscapes as contested
sites and places of political struggle. We will focus on modes of visualizing
landscapes and explore the race, class, and gender dimensions of such
natural visions.
Seminar
II: Visualizing Whiteness: Between the Global
and the Local (Leaders: Thomas Nakayama
and Raka Shome). The study of everyday
whiteness as a racialized and colonialist ideology has become a central area
of investigation in critical studies across a number of disciplines. As a powerful
construct informing interlocking systems of domination, it is important to uncover
the rhetorics by which whiteness ends up as a central organizing principle structuring
the social fabric, while remaining invisible. This seminar, located within this
conversation on whiteness, seeks to explore the visual rhetorics of whiteness.
It will examine how the racial imagery of whiteness both informs the struggle
over national belonging, and, given the transnational relations of media, influences
larger relations of globalization.
Seminar
III: Iconic Photography and Public Culture
(Leaders: John Louis Lucaites and Robert
Hariman) This seminar will explore the role that iconic photography
– especially in its photojournalistic form – plays in underwriting
American, liberal-democratic public culture. Drawing upon recent interest in
pictorial discourse, performance theory, and the relationship between public
culture and democratic theory, we will focus attention on the role that iconic
photographs play in articulating specific conceptions of civic identity and
on the ways in which they provide formal, aesthetic resolution to fundamental
contradictions in American public culture. We will also explore the hypothesis
that photojournalism operates as a performative ritual in literate societies.
The seminar will be organized around case studies of the representation of war
and dissent.
Seminar
IV: Visual Rhetorics of Witnessing: Representation,
War, and Cultural Trauma (Leaders: A. Susan
Owen and Peter Ehrenhaus) This
seminar will examine works that contribute to our understanding of visual rhetorics
of witnessing, where witnessing is defined as the rhetorical processes and practices
through which traumatic memory is constructed. Visual rhetorics of witnessing
operate at the intersection of traumatizing cultural experience, collective
identity, and narrative (discursive and visual) representation practices. The
manner in which traumatic memory is narrativized provides glimpses into the
process of collective (i.e., national) identity construction and the dynamics
of ideological struggles to construct usable pasts. Readings will include theoretical
treatments of "trauma," "narrative," "history,"
and their relationships, as well as critical studies that address specific sites
of cultural trauma and hegemonic struggle.
Seminar
V: Material Memory: Exhibitionary Rhetorics
and Politics (Leaders: Barbara Biesecker
and Kenneth Cmiel) Over the last several
decades, museums have come to be seen as particularly poignant sites for the
interrogation of the cultural politics of representation. This seminar aims
to revisit and extend this inquiry by addressing the following questions: What
is a museum (a vehicle for the production and dissemination of knowledge, a
technology of publicity, a disciplinary apparatus, or something else altogether);
what are the entailments for critical practice of defining it one way rather
than another; and how has all this evolved over the last two centuries? While
a shared set of critical readings will provide a common point of departure in
the seminar, we expect participants will enrich the conversation by bringing
their own projects and disciplinary expertise to the table.
Seminar
VI: The Visual Politics and Poetics of Native
American Performance (Leaders: Oscar Giner
and William C. Trapani) This seminar
examines recent efforts to correct the representation of Native American peoples
in museum and memorial practices, dance ceremonials, photographs and traditional
performances. By analyzing the historical development and political force of
such efforts we will interrogate their peril and promise, particularly as they
relate to the development of an "authentic" Indian voice, and the
need to define an aesthetic perspective in the examination of Native American
myths, ceremonials and recorded performances.
Seminar
VII: The Socio-Imaging of Politics (Leaders:
Bruce E. Gronbeck and James
P. McDaniel) Political acts not only create policy but also polity:
they get things done in society and simultaneously assert a political identity
for citizens of that society. Political images, as well, are both messages arraying
political symbols and also frames or fields that position their citizen-viewers
within specifiable subject positions, i.e., identities. Political images are
constructed so as to be viewed and yet to have that viewing done from some *where*
by some *one*. This seminar explores these dual rhetorical processes, theoretically
and practically.
Seminar VIII: Postmodern Media Communities: Signs, Symptoms, Visions of the Future (Leader: Ron Burnett) Although, there are now many strategies for trying to understand community, there is less and less clarity to the conventional use of the term, which grew out particular notions of locality and geographic proximity. Dissent, contestation, grassroots knowledge, the sharing of information and knowledge and the struggle to define meaning and communication are central characteristics of postmodern media communities. These are communities where people get to know each other through a variety of media experiences that do not have a direct connection to geography. Networked technologies, zines, web-based environments, Freenets, listservs, and electronic mail have fundamentally altered the geographic boundaries of human interaction. This in turn has led to a redefinition of the meaning of communal interaction. A common characteristic of these communities is the use of visual media to communicate and share resources and ideas. Little attention is paid to the medium of communication. Rather, technology is used to facilitate existing or new relationships. This seminar will explore many of the contradictions and benefits that these new forms of community interaction have made possible.
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March 3, 2005
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