CLCS 247T French Cultural Institutions: Power and Representation
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French authors and artists were instrumental in shaping the imaginary of the "Orient", with a myriad of paintings and texts housed for public consumption in national cultural institutions. Students will use the French case to explore the politics of representation: the creation and objectification of an Oriental "Other". On-the-ground field study in museums, archives and galleries of Paris (the former colonial capital) and Marseille (the "Gateway to North Africa") will help students to investigate the ties that bind the visual arts and literature with the exercising of knowledge and power, and to read literary and artistic works as shaped by their cultural and historical circumstances. The strong Arab and Berber presence in both cities today, in particular from France's former colonies in North Africa, will provide the impetus to question how contemporary writers and artists explicitly and implicitly engage with and renegotiate these "cultural artifacts", and what broader significance this might have for questions of representation and identity, Self and Other, in the (not only French) present. Students will read contemporary texts by authors such as Leïla Sebbar and Assia Djébar and explore work by visual artists including Zineb Sedira and Zoulikha Bouabdellah, using their, and our own, "encounters" in the Louvre, the Pompidou Center, the Arab World Institute, MuCEM and smaller galleries to consider the significance of reappropriating the gaze and of the relationship between visual pleasure and politics, while questioning who art is "for" and where the "representation business" takes us. (The course may count toward the French Studies major in consultation with the coordinator of the French Studies program.)