Meets with HISTART 689.003

This seminar explores the function and power of images within cultural, religious, and political expressions across the modern and contemporary Islamic world. Various aspects of the visual in diverse geographic spheres are explored via paintings, art installations, posters, photographs, murals, graffiti, graphic novels, animated movies, and digital media. Such artworks raise a number of important questions surrounding practices of iconoclasm, neo-traditional aesthetics, word-and-image interactions, and image-based radical feminism, political resistance, ecology, and war. Addressing a broad selection of artistic forms and thematic questions, this course aims to critically delineate, assess, and expand a number of theoretical models as these have been applied to visual materials produced in the modern and contemporary Islamic world.

Course Requirements: Class Participation 30%, Oral Presentation 30%, Final Paper 40%

Class Format: One 3-hour seminar/week.

Intended Audience: Upper-level undergraduate students and graduate students

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0

HISTART Concentration Distributions: Middle East and Asia, Modern and Contemporary

Keywords: Islam, visual culture, graffiti, war, ecology