Expressive Culture | 2022-2023

FALL 2022 CORE-UA 711, Expressive Culture: The Graphic Novel
Prof. Borenstein (Russian and Slavic Studies)        [Syllabus]      
Examines the interplay between words and images in the graphic novel, a hybrid medium with a system of communication reminiscent of prose fiction, animation, and film. What is the connection between text and art? How are internal psychology, time, and action conveyed in a static series of words and pictures? What can the graphic novel convey that other media cannot? Authors include Alan Moore, Art Spiegelman, Peter Milligan, Charles Burns, Carla Speed McNeil.

FALL 2022 CORE-UA 722, Expressive Culture: Architecture in New York Field Study
Prof. Broderick (Art History)       [Syllabus]
New York's rich architectural heritage offers a unique opportunity for firsthand consideration of the concepts and styles of modern urban architecture, as well as its social, financial, and cultural contexts. Meets once a week for an extended period combining on-campus lectures with group excursions to prominent buildings. Attention is given both to individual buildings as examples of 19th- and 20th-century architecture and to phenomena such as the development of the skyscraper and the adaptation of older buildings to new uses.

FALL 2022 CORE-UA 725, Expressive Culture: Architecture 
Prof. Cohen (Institute of Fine Arts)        [Syllabus] 
Modern Architecture, 1900 to the Present. A diachronic account of architecture and urban design since 1900, exploring broadly developments that have taken place on all the continents, from the apex of imperialism to the postcolonial, globalized world of today. Topics include: the conflicting currents that emerged before the First World War, new technological developments, and the impact of the war; architecture and politics in the 1920s and 1930s with the rise of expressionist design, the “international style,” and the concurrent adaptation of traditional styles; colonial policies and their languages; the impact of the Second World War on architectural discourse and practice; mid-twentieth century corporate architecture, brutalism, and the reactions to late modernism; the invention of postcolonial built forms in their variety; and the main aspects and the divides of contemporary architectural designs, as they deal with environmental and social challenges. The analysis associates a precise consideration of form and an interpretation of ideological and political dimensions in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Oscar Niemeyer, Louis Kahn, Alvar Aalto, James Stirling, Alvaro Siza, Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, as well as of several contemporary designers.

FALL 2022 CORE-UA 730, Expressive Culture: Sounds
Prof. [Staff] (Music)        [Syllabus]   
Our lives pulsate with patterns of sounds that we call music, yet we rarely think consciously about what they mean. Questions how music has been created, produced, perceived, and evaluated at diverse historical moments, in a variety of geographical locations, and among different cultural groups. Through aural explorations and discussion of how these vivid worlds "sound" in time and space, assesses the value and function of music in human experience.

FALL 2022 CORE-UA 750, Expressive Culture: Film
Prof. Polan (Cinema Studies)        [Syllabus]       
Citizen Kane and Hollywood Movie-Making. Within the history of American film, Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane from 1941 enjoys special status as a work that pushed Hollywood studio filmmaking in experimental directions, with its complicated editing, deep focus, and complex sound design. It has energetic supporters (it was for many years the front-runner in the film magazine Sight & Sound poll of critics’ top film) and detractors (for example, the German exile philosophers Horkheimer and Adorno saw it as the key example of Hollywood paying lip service to experimentalism, all the better to close it off everywhere else). We examine the phenomenon of Citizen Kane through both close reading (shot-by-shot analysis) and broader, contextual study, including the nature of the Hollywood studio system, questions around film authorship, and notions of genre; and look at films by other directors from the Hollywood studio era as a point of comparison and contrast. Above all, we study editing, shot composition, narrative structure, and acting in the composition of Citizen Kane as a work of Hollywood experimentation.

SPRING 2023 CORE-UA 700, Expressive Culture: Topics—Global Hip Hop 
Prof. Dattatreyan (Anthropology)
The global circulation and uptake of hip hop and its creative practices since its birth in the boogie down Bronx in the 1970s. We use primary sources and scholarly texts to critically engage with how hip hop—as a quintessentially Black American mode of cultural resistance and capitalist hustle—has inspired various popular cultural innovations in postcolonies across the global south and in the metropoles of Europe. In the interdisciplinary tradition of cultural studies, we think through how manifestations of hip hop across the globe reflect and refract the micropolitics of gender, sexuality, race, class, ethnicity, and language where its music, dance, visual aesthetics, and fashion have taken root. 

SPRING 2023 CORE-UA 700, Expressive Culture: Topics—Black Diasporic Dance 
Prof. Cox (Anthropology)
What does it mean to call a form of expression “dance” or label it as “Black”? We consider what is held within the category of Black or African diasporic dance and then move through some of the prominent themes, transformative moments, and influential figures in Black dance traditions. Students engage with readings, film, live performances, guest presenters, and their own moving bodies to identify the cultural symbols that inflect diasporic dance communities, along with the methods that dancers, choreographers, and community members employ to mobilize the dancing body in various social and political landscapes. Rather than attempting to survey the entire canon of global Black dance, we instead explore how the anthropological interest in ‘how the world makes people and how people, in turn, make the world’ is exemplified through processes of embodiment and community identity formation. 

SPRING 2023 CORE-UA 700, Expressive Culture: Topics—Making the Ancient Mediterranean World
Prof. J. Hopkins (Art History)
The lands surrounding the Mediterranean were, in antiquity, home to a diverse multitude of peoples, religions, social traditions, geographies and much more. Often studied through powerful imperializing governmental and cultural groups, like Egyptians, Assyrians, Greeks and Romans, the space has long been a centerpiece in the academic search for the ancient roots of modern life. The Pyramids of Giza, Greek sculpture, the Colosseum have all been studied for generations by scholars in hopes of understanding this past. But who made these works? Who was responsible for crafting a marble sculpture in Athens, stacking the blocks of a pyramid, painting a vessel with the intricate story of Achilles or Athena, or pouring molten bronze to fabricate a portrait bust? How did trade networks allow them to gain access to needed materials, and how did those materials reshape their craft? Where did a ruler’s will clash with an artisan’s necessary creative intelligence, and how did these conversations shape the Mediterranean world? We trace the connections that brought North African paint to Italic shores, Italic bronze to Greek artist studios, and allowed images of reclining elites to populate tombs in Persian-, Etruscan- and Greek-occupied territories. We examine how those images communicated both shared and differing values, and case studies across a 2000-year period, when a central feature of life was an immovable natural element—a vast body of water stretching nearly 1 million square miles—that enabled engagements in belief systems, culinary practices, governments, philosophy and much more, often through the art and craft of the material world. We also contend with the ways that these ancient traditions have been appropriated by modern, especially European, imperializing cultures in the creation of academic disciplines and global power systems.

SPRING 2023 CORE-UA 720, Expressive Culture: Images
Prof. Damman (Institute of Fine Arts)
Feminist and Queer Visions—Art in New York City. We explore the artistic production of feminist, queer, trans, and non-binary artists across the last century. Emphasizing the politics of location, we orient our study through the coordinates of New York City, beginning in Harlem in the 1920s and making our way into the present. What are the historical roles of “visibility” and “representation?” How are visual cultures of gender and sexuality shaped by processes of racialization? We take “feminist” and “queer” as operative, but not self-evident terms; and in differing historical moments, the figures we study identify variously. Our second term, “visions” is equally important. It refers both to the visual art objects that are our primary objects of study as well as to other forms of cultural production––zines, erotic imagery, political campaigns, and archival snapshots––with which we put them in dialogue. We pay particular attention to the ways that historical actors have preserved, archived, and/or speculatively conjured feminist and queer elders with whom they might be in community and, on the other hand, the ways that feminist and queer politics have long imagined futures that are not yet here.

SPRING 2023 CORE-UA 720, Expressive Culture: Images
Prof. Courtois (Institute of Fine Arts)
Global Impressionisms. We amend the Euro-centric narrative (and consequential narrow chronological framework) of impressionism to broaden the geographical scope of late 19th- and early 20th-century art history, and examine art produced in Japan, Turkey, South Africa and Brazil, among others places. Looking at transcontinental patterns of influence (how European artists invigorated their practice by looking at foreign art, and how the rule-breaking of French modernists impacted artistic traditions of other countries) we engage with art history’s current concern with globalizing the canon.

SPRING 2023 CORE-UA 730, Expressive Culture: Sounds
Prof. Terry (Music)
The rhythmic revolution that took place starting from Machito and his Afro-Cubans in the 1940’s changed the course of American music forever. It became an integral part of the American soundscape. In order to understand the evolution of Cuban music, we begin with Cuba’s social structures, complex immigration history, and cultural heritage. We cover the many genres of Cuban music that grew out of this mixture of history and social conditions, and an anatomy of the sounds that identify the various genres of Cuban music. Students become acquainted with these different musical styles and traditions, and develop an understanding of the role of beat, syncopation, and melodic counterpoint in Cuban music and attend performances of Cuban music in the NYC area when possible.

SPRING 2023 CORE-UA 730, Expressive Culture: Sounds
Prof. Gribenski (Music)
Auditory phenomena have shaped various cultures’ spatial experiences in multiple ways, from bells conveying ideas of territoriality to various forms of resonance that give a measure of interior and outdoor environments, and from musicians’ experimentations with space to sound’s ability to evoke a sense of place. We explore music and sound’s special relationship to space, considered both from a physical and a sociocultural point of view. Drawing on a large body of literature from the arts, the sciences, and the humanities, we listen to what sounds tell us about space and, in turn, how space has shaped sonic and musical cultures from prehistoric times to the present.

SPRING 2023 CORE-UA 750, Expressive Culture: Film
Prof. Stam (Cinema Studies)        
Brazilian Cinema, Media, and culture. To understand film, we adopt a trans-disciplinary approach to the history, literature, and popular culture that shape and nourish film. With examples are drawn from television, music video, sketch comedy, activist videos, performances, and parodies, we move from musical comedies (chanchadas) and the studio films of Vera Cruz in the 1950s, to the various phases of Cinema Novo, on to the 1990s rebirth (retomada) of the cinema, culminating with the extremely variegated productions of a new generation of 21st century filmmakers. Themes include representations and self-representation of the indigenous peoples in Brazil (the so-called “Indians”); foundational fictions of Euro-indigenous romance; representations of Afro-Brazilian culture; carnival and the carnivalesque; Brazilian modernism and anthropophagy; alternative aesthetics; dictatorship, censorship, and resistance; literary adaptation; the telenovela; musical audiotopias; the favela and the divided city; the counter-culture; intersectionalities of race, class, gender, and sexuality; indigenous media; and the emergence of new social actors.