Reading & Composition

Across time, geographies, and cultures, artists have been driven to reflect on militarization and war. What does war do? How do soldiers, civilians, children, and "nations" become militarized? What role do artists play in militarized cultures? In this course we will examine how the arts are deployed in times of war, in militarized zones, in postwar memorializations, and in future fantasy wars. We will analyze "performance" in diverse militarized cultures through the technologies of animation, film, new media, and theatre. With the course focus on critical reading and analytic writing, we will investigate case studies with theory and contextual readings, which will be our tools for developing an argument, writing analysis, and thinking critically. Through these different media, visual and literary, popular and classic, from several different cultures and nations, we will consider how artists choose to deal with the many conditions of oppression, terrorism, and violence through their medium in their contexts. In particular we will consider how a nation or culture uses "documentary" and "dramatic" and "fantastic" performance to re-enact, spectacularize, mediatize, and/or document acts of militarization, protest, oppression, glorification, and censorship.

Further, we will pay close attention to gender and race as we question the roles of art and artists who serve the state, who turn their work into direct confrontations to critique the state, and those who romanticize acts of war and military oppression. With which medium can we best approach the acts of
militarization and destruction, from terrorism to attack, from invasion through occupation, and finally reconciliation? Can art find a way to illuminate or make transparent the motives, the drives, and the deeper circumstances of war? Can we afford to give war and militarism expression in the arts?