080027 SE Seminar: The Art of Exile, Diaspora, and Migration (2016W)

Course Description

This seminar examines contemporary artistic practices that treat experiences of Exile, Diaspora, and Migration within the context of modernity and globalization. How do human beings come to terms with such conditions and transformations in their lives? What are the cultural, emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic effects of being exiled from your place of birth? Can the sense of loss be compensated for by the idea that something can also be gained?

While the free-market and cultural dynamics of neoliberal global capitalism often celebrate an interlinked world of open communication and mobility that brings people closer together, many artists are interrogating the realities and effects of movement and deracination from one’s homeland and the adaptation to new lands. Yet contemporary mobility is complex and implies diverse forms of existence: the voluntary decision to travel abroad in an attempt to gain new citizenship or temporary legal residence for economic purposes is vastly different from the involuntary consequence of fleeing one’s country and losing the rights of the citizen. We should also distinguish the particular experience of the inhabitants of former colonial empires who possessed various categories of citizenship and multiple structures of belonging

Some questions that will guide our course include: (1) How are these material, sociopolitical, and psychological conditions and narratives of transit given aesthetic form in different contexts? (2) How do artists of different generations and genders represent the experience of belonging to or feeling disconnected from geographic, national, governmental, ethnic, linguistic, cultural identities and communities? (3) Is there a universal preoccupation with location and the desire to conjure the homeland into existence, or has it been mediated and particularized by different historical circumstances