Fall 2016 Courses

Professor Sheril Antonio

ASPP-UT 1020 (Undergraduate – Juniors and Seniors only)

ASPP-GT 2020 (Graduate)

Thursdays, 2pm – 5:30pm

4 credits

History/ criticism or Humanities – 4 credits

Prerequisite: One intro film history/ criticism class

This course looks at how difference is constructed in film through reading assignments, in class screenings and critical analysis of full-length features including main stream Hollywood, independent, and international films.  This inquiry will take note that while some of these films may be conventional in form, in content they challenge accepted notions of differences, or stereotypes. Our goal is to catalog films that resist accepted notions of the "other." To accomplish our goals we will deal primarily with textual analysis that focuses on story, character, as well as cinematic space and time. With the help of the required texts we will examine socially accepted notions of the "other" and see how they are derived and or challenged in and by films, thus looking at how an art form can interact with socially accepted forms of "othering." The objective of the course is to train emerging artists and scholars to engage in critical analysis that can make profound contributions to the individual's unique creative or analytical process. Another intention of the course is to delineate and occupy the space left for debate between authorship as expressed from a directorial perspective from authorship from the spectator's point of view.

Professor Pato Hebert

ASPP-GT 2003 (MA Arts Politics Students Only - not open to other students)

Tuesdays, 11:00am – 1:45pm

2-3 credits

The APP Graduate Colloquium is the space in the fall semester devoted solely to the APP group. The Colloquium involves conversations and explorations with each other and other exceptional practitioners, field visits, sharing of work among the group, probing critical shared threads/questions – pragmatic and ethical, and writing.

The group begins the process of preparing for collaboration, research, and convening that will continue in the spring semester in the Cultural Activism Class and Field Work class. 

Professor Karen Finley

ASPP – UT 1028 (Undergraduate –Seniors only)

ASPP – GT 2028 (Graduate only)

Crosslisted with PERF – GT 2804 (PERF section only for Performance Studies students)

Mondays, 6-9pm

4 points – will count toward elective credits for undergraduates

Performance Matters will consider what influences private and public performance, to consider what is performing, what we perform and how we perform. This class will look deeper into varying aspects of staging such as everyday experience, lists, menus, rituals, timing, gathering and collecting. Performing and communicating the body: gender, race and identification. Awareness of work in progress, process, such as text, script, online and improvisation will be utilized. The visual aspect of performing: such as accessories, design and costume. Listening, finding voice and giving and taking commands, and deviation from dominant norms of entertainment and product. Hopefully with deeper understanding, we will seek to challenge and stimulate our own creative content to produce original, thought provoking performance. Students will present their own work either individually or in groups, write about the theory and content of their production and have assigned readings to supplement their areas of concentration. 

Professor Dr. Marta Vega

ASPP–UT 1060 (Undergraduate - Sophomores, Juniors and Seniors only)

ASPP-GT 2060 (Graduate only)

Fridays, 11:00am - 1:45pm

4 credits – will count toward general education requirements (Humanities)

This course provides the opportunity for students to historically contextualize the growth of the community cultural arts movement grounded in the social and cultural equity activists movements that grew out of the Civil Rights Movement.  The continuing mission and work of multidisciplinary community based cultural arts organizations challenge cultural and social inequities framing their creative work and organizational practices to assure equitable inclusion of the varying aesthetic criteria and expressions that reflect the multiethnic communities that are integral to the nations cultural identity.

The first section of the course will take place in advocacy cultural arts community based organizations in the city. Community arts leaders in the field in collaboration with the class instructor will teach the course. This team teaching approach will afford students direct exposure and learning experiences with practitioners in the field within the communities they serve. Students will have direct immersion within the community and the community organization understanding the operational and programmatic realities of the field as well as direct engagement in advocacy creative work. Students will be exposed to teaching strategies for working within communities that include readings, open discussions, as well as working on multidisciplinary collaborations in the field. 

Professor Pato Hebert

ASPP – UT 1000 (Undergraduate – Juniors, Seniors)

ASPP- GT 2000 (Graduate)

Mondays, 2-4:45pm

4 points – will count toward general education requirements (Social Science)

This course explores how visual artists have worked with the city as the location and catalyst for their work. To inform our creative production and play, we will draw from theories of place, space and the urban as developed by critical geographers and city planners. We will also conduct close readings of contemporary art historians’ examinations into key artistic interventions in cityscapes over the last thirty years. How have artists understood the city itself as material, content, creative convergence? While we will look at artistic projects from various global urban contexts, New York City will serve as a primary ongoing site for reference, investigation and engagement. New York will be explored through the work of essayists and fiction writers who have taken the city as subject. We will also direct and make regular excursions into the surrounding urbanscape to shape our creative practices. Students will engage in weekly readings and discussions, complete writing assignments to hone conceptual skills, and create and evaluate their own original artworks both individually and in groups.

Professor Jack Tchen

ASPP – GT 2001 (Graduate only)

Crosslisted with PERF – GT 2312 and ELEC-GG 2680

Wednesdays, 12:30pm-3:30pm

4 points

This seminar aims to give students both a conceptual and practical grounding in the range of issues and approaches by which arts politics can be understood. We will think about the complexities that lie between the politics that make art and the politics that art makes—which is to say the array of forces that give rise to specific artistic practices and the agency and efficacy of artistic work.

The course will be framed by the following considerations: What are the institutional, discursive, and ideological contexts that shape the objects, images, sounds or texts we catalog “art?” What are the links between cultural spaces-- the museum, the movie-theater, the gallery, the music/dance hall, the bookstore, the fashion runway, the public street, television, cyber space-- and the larger realm of politics? And how do these relationships impact, implicitly or explicitly, the ways we create, curate, or study the arts? How do consumers play an active role in the reception of artistic products and practices? What is the relation between formally promulgated cultural policy and the tacit knowledge that artists catalog upon to get their work into the world? What dimensions of the broader cultural terrain are made legible through artistic practice? What are the means through which art intervenes in the political arena? “Art” will be studied as a site of contested representations and visions, embedded in power formations-- themselves shaped by specific historical moments and geographical locations. Given contemporary global technologies, cultural practices will also be studied within the transnational “travel” of ideas and people. Such germane issues as the legal and constitutional dimensions of censorship, the social formation of taste, the consumption of stars, the bio-politics of the body, transnational copyrights law-- will all pass through an intersectional analyses of gender, race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, and nation, incorporating the insights of such areas of inquiry as multiculturalism, feminism, postcolonialism, and queer studies.

Each session is organized around the exploration of a key term, with readings that develop conceptual and practical issues. Art examples will be shown in class.

Professor Karen Finley

ASPP-UT 1034 (Undergraduate – Juniors and Seniors Only)

ASPP-GT 2034 Graduate Section

Mondays, 11am– 1:45pm

4 points – will count toward general education requirements (Humanities)

This class is a series of explorations of case studies, events, artistic examples, and reflecting on the expressions of femininity, or being female. What does it mean to be female today and what does being or acting feminine mean? We will look at individuals as examples but we will also consider sexuality, gender roles and female archetypes. The class begins with considering what is a female perspective and approach to life and what is a feminine genre? Or what does it mean to not be feminine? The sense of “feminine” will be given a broader understanding and scope rather than only studying female cultural icons. The concept is for students to consider “feminist” perspective in their own lives so that they can consider ways or strategies for their choices. We will also look at the rebelliousness of socially acceptable norms of being, acting like- gender expectations a girl, going against dominant norms. We will also be looking at different cultural aspects of the feminine mystique.

Professors Dr. Ella Shohat and Kathy Engel

ASPP – UT 1049 (Undergraduate – Seniors Only)

ASPP- GT 2049 (Graduate)

Wednesdays, 4:55 – 7:40pm

4 points– will count toward general education requirements (Humanities)

This seminar will study questions of displacement as represented, mediated and narrated in a wide variety of texts. It will focus especially on memoirs, whether in written or audiovisual form, which confront exclusionary and essentialist discourses with a rich cultural production that foregrounds a complex understanding of such issues as “home,” “homeland,” “exile,” “hybridity” and “minorities.” How are identity and history performed in these colonial, post-colonial and diasporic contexts? What is the status and significance of the oral, the visual and the performed within the context of memory? We will examine different narrative forms of memory-making, analyzing how post/colonial authors and media-makers perform “home,” “homeland,” “diaspora,” and “exile.” How does memory become a filter for constructing contemporary discourses of belonging, especially in the context of postindependence and transnational dislocations?

While examining texts and audiovisual forms of memoir, we will create our own, with particular focus on language, narrative, multilateral expression of story through time, place, and context. We will look at multilingualism, and memoir as a form of resistance and survival.

We will also address questions of genre, and the socio-political ramifications of certain modes of writing and performances of memory that create new hybrid genres such as the poetic documentary and experimental autobiography. We will analyze works where a fractured temporality is reassembled to form a usable past where the body serves as an icon of migratory meanings. We will also examine contemporary cyber diasporic practices, problematizing such issues as “nostalgia” and “return” in the context of new communication technologies.

As co leaders of the class, a poet and a scholar, we will explore the relationships between ways of seeing, knowing, recording and transforming experience.

Professor Hentyle Yapp

ASPP – UT 1006 (Juniors and Seniors Only)

ASPP- GT 2006 (Graduate)

Thursdays, 11am – 1:45pm

4 points – will count toward general education requirements (Humanities)

This course examines what happens when we shift away from an understanding of race as primarily visual to other sensibilities. How might we make sense of race beyond visuality? What are the theoretical, methodological, and political implications of sensing race?  By questioning the ableist limits of visibility, this course relies on disability and queer studies to expand sensory capacities towards the kinesthetic, erotic, sonic, aural, tactile, oral, and olfactory. In foregrounding sense, this course tempers and takes stock of the recent affective turn. In particular, by exploring the relationship between phenomenology and affect within Frantz Fanon’s work, French theory, and queer studies, we begin to chart possibilities through sense and intimacy. Furthermore, this course emphasizes and situates affect and sense making within the phenomena of colonial encounters, racialization, and the production of the New World order to contend with the political limits and possibilities of sense, intimacy, affect, and phenomenology. In other words, what are the stakes in sensing race, particularly as it relates to questions surrounding the transnational and governmentality? This course will examine theorists like Frantz Fanon, Audre Lorde, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jasbir Puar, Sylvia Wynter, Gilles Deleuze, Mel Chen, Michel Foucault, Hortense Spillers, and Kyla Wazana Tompkins. In addition, we will engage dance (Faustin Linyekula, Tao Dance, and Ralph Lemon), new media (Jacolby Satterwhite, Cao Fei, and Kapwani Kiwanga), sound (M. Lamar and Nam June Paik), installation (Bert Benally, Yan Xing, and Isaac Julien), and performance art (Xandra Ibarra, Shirin Neshat, and Cassils).