Image: Commemorative Postage Stamp of the Nationalization of the Republic of Iraq's Oil Industry, c. 1962.

This course examines visual cultures in the modern Middle East and the political and social conditions that produced them. Starting with Roland Barthes, W. J. T. Mitchell, and practices of looking across media and cultures, the course proceeds through a series of thematic case studies of images and formative political events. From print photography in the 1905 Constitutional Revolution in Iran, Turkish political cartoons during Ataturk's secularist reforms, Saddam Hussein's cult of personality and public monuments, to ISIS's hyper-visual propaganda and iconoclasm through online media, we will examine how images and communication technologies both facilitate and document sociopolitical transformations. By examining a broad range of materials, including poster arts, government murals, popular religious commodities, and protest art and graffiti, students will gain tools to think critically about visuality through engaging with 20th-century Middle Eastern cultural contexts and the visual materials that helped shape them.

Broader themes addressed through course readings and discussions will include issues of nationalism, gender, race, and violence as they relate to visual production in the Middle East. Questions we will consider throughout the term include what is the rhetoric of an image, how can visual culture be an analytical tool for study across different disciplines and cultural fields, and what the modern Middle East can teach us about the politics of visual expression. Altogether we will critically consider visual culture and its political practices and dynamics in making the Middle East what it is today.

Course Objectives:
• Learn methodologies of visual culture and practices of looking across cultures and media.
• Practice visual analysis through class discussions, quizzes, and writing assignments.
• Engage critically with a history of key political events and developments in the 20th-century Middle East, with no prior knowledge necessary.
• Study the production and circulation of Middle Eastern visual culture as it evolved through different lenses, including technological developments, oil wealth and modernism, Pan-Arab nationalism and academic art schools, the rise of dictatorships and third world movements, varying politicizations of Islam, war and iconoclasm, and contemporary stakes of creative production in the region.

HISTART concentration distributions: A. The Middle East, 4. Modern and Contemporary