HISTART 393-102

Undergraduate Seminar:
Settler Colonialism in Pacific Islands Art & Visual Culture: 1788 - Present

Meeting Remotely
TTh 1:00 - 4:00pm
Spring
3 Credit Seminar

While a variety of fields such as political science and history have contributed to the burgeoning field of settler colonial studies, art history has only recently begun to consider the central role of the visual and material in this form of colonialism. This course will investigate the intersection of visual culture and Settler-Colonialism in Hawaiʻi, Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia between 1788 and the present. Land is the central focus of settler-colonialism, which primarily distinguishes itself from other forms of colonization by settlement and the establishment of new social/political orders through the dispossession and erasure of Indigenous societies and cultures, which continues to this day.

As such we will explore an array of complex representations of settler and Indigenous identities, with a particular focus on how these inflect competing approaches to sovereignty and resource management whether that be ecological, historical, or political. We will examine important works such as the Yirrkala Bark Petition of 1963, Queen Kapiʻolani's coronation photographs and William Hodge's A View in Dusky Bay New Zealand, as well as a range of other media including paintings, prints, sculpture, photography, the fiber arts, and film. This course will employ both lecture and discussion components to provide students with a grounding in Settler and Indigenous visual cultures, key works of scholarship and theory to arrive at critical readings of the objects under review.

History of Art Concentration Distributions: Modern and Contemporary; Asia, Europe and the U.S. (specifically Hawaiʻi)