Honors

HNRS 221-01: Visual Experience/African Cities

Cities in Africa, like their counterparts elsewhere in the world, are intensely -- perhaps even unrelentingly -- visual environments. In Dakar as in Nairobi, in Johannesburg as in Lagos, the urban terrain’s unparalleled resources enable myriad visual phenomena including paintings and sculptures, modernist architecture and public monuments, sartorial expression, as well as printed and electronic media such as cartoons, advertisements, video, television, and the internet.This seminar style course focuses on the visual propositions constituting the urban environment and seeks to consider how visual culture is produced, interpreted, and consumed in contemporary urban Africa.

To this end, this course will explore the following questions: How does the city offer unique opportunities for the production and consumption of visual propositions? What is the nature of visuality in the city? How do individuals create and engage these visual forms to construct, evaluate, contest or subvert contemporary social realities? How do these forms operate as both individual expressions and collective resources?How does the influx of visual phenomena from one city shape visual expression in another? And, if we understand expressive forms as operating in a world of intertextuality, we must ask, how urban visual projects entangle and interface with other creative expressions (such as music in Kinshasa or Lagos)?

Spring Term: 2008

Credits: 4

Fulfills: GE Requirement in Fine Arts (A)

Meeting times: 11:30-1:20 MW

Instructor: Joanna Grabski

Open to: Sophomores/Jrs/Srs Only