Courses

All art is political, but some art is made as a form of protest or to incite an audience to protest. Most often it is both. This course—though far from exhaustive in its coverage—will present a sample of genres (music, plastic arts, theater, dance, installation, photography) in a variety of locations and times to understand how art and artists have engaged in protest. Much of modern art is conceptual, using installations and performances, to communicate. Therefore, we will start the class by first understanding what we mean by protest, which will underpin how we think about artists’ using various media to voice opposition. Then, we turn to T. J. Clark, the preeminent art historian, for his answer to the question, when did modern art begin and how does it relate to protest? This question will lead us to explore the debate on the purpose of art in the 20th century and into the present. Next, we will move to how artists responded to moments of crisis in the early 20th century—world wars, economic depression, and the rise of fascism—because the art that emerged informs much of what we see today. Based on these foundational questions, the class will turn to case studies from around the globe.

Our world is interconnected thanks to the worldwide web, social media, academic institutions, news outlets, ease of international travel, fashion trends, diasporic communities, music…the threads that are woven into the global textile are boundless. However, this textile is torn and frayed. People are–as they have been for centuries–fragmented by war, religion, disasters and crises, poverty, and disparate concentrations of wealth. In this class, we will examine these various fault lines, by addressing issues such as cultural difference, nationalism, populism, and identity politics. By understanding the fissures in our collective humanity, we will have a better understanding of what binds us together.

This course centers around analyzing the political economy and structure of the contemporary world order, its underlying logics, origins and inherently political nature, how it is (and is not) governed, and how power is exercised therein by actors including states, corporations, international institutions, and even individuals. As we will highlight throughout the semester, issues related to global political economy and governance shape the lives of people all over the world, including our own.

Within the Global North social-science mainstream, Latin America (like other parts of the Global South) has often been conceptualized as a region of analytical interest due to its complex internal dynamics (relating, for example, to recurring authoritarian rule, democratization, transitional justice, “modernization” and economic development, and social mobilization). Yet until recently, these have infrequently been conceptualized as global processes in which Latin America plays a substantive role. To be sure, various external forces—namely, colonialism, imperialism, interventionism, and their legacies—are of course widely understood to have shaped Latin American in myriad ways. However, the notions that Latin America exercises agency (or at least matters) in world affairs, is more than a generally passive recipient of global flows, and is meaningfully connected to other regions (including through migratory, political, economic, and cultural linkages), have only recently begun to resonate within the Northern academy.    

In contrast to the “methodological nationalism” (or “regionalism”) that has long characterized outside analysis of Latin America, this course foregrounds the region’s global embeddedness and world-making potential—as a protagonist in the generation, adaptation, and diffusion of diverse border-crossing flows, frameworks, and imaginaries. These include: global discourses concerning modernity, postmodernity, liberalism, and postcolonialism; global understandings of race, class, gender, and the intersections between them; global policy frameworks related to human rights, democracy, and economic development; historical and contemporary globalizing relations with distant parts of the world, including the Middle East and Asia; and global alternatives to a world order based on exclusion, extractivism, and environmental degradation.

Throughout, we will highlight the agency of state and non-state actors throughout “Latin America”—itself a homogenizing, Eurocentric label imposed from the outside—as constitutive forces in creating the world that we all inhabit, contributing to the problems that confront us, and helping to generate solutions. To do so, we will engage with a series of texts and materials produced by diversely situated interdisciplinary scholars, writers, artists, and political figures—many of them based in Latin America, and operating in languages other than English—who are all seeking to make sense of the region’s place in the world. From a transnational perspective, we will also identify pockets of “Global Latin America” that exist beyond the region’s borders, including in parts of New York City.

“Wall Street is a disaster area”—so declared a real estate lawyer in a 1974 New York Times story on the pitiful state of lower Manhattan. The World Trade Center had been inaugurated in 1973 as a beacon of global capitalism with a mandate to lease only to international firms. A year later, much of the Twin Towers went unoccupied. Some eight million square feet of financial district office space sat empty, brokerage houses were shuttering at a rate of more than one per day, and the surrounding city was hurtling towards a full-blown fiscal crisis. The New York of the mid-1970s did not appear destined to become the model global city we know today. Within a decade, however, the city had transformed into a central node—arguably the central node—in the ballooning global financial industry and its accompanying class and cultural formations. But this outcome was never guaranteed. How did New York go from “Fear City” to “Capital of the World”? What historical structures, contingencies, and policy decisions produced Global New York?

This course examines New York City’s long history as a site of globalization. Since European colonization, New York has served as a hub in world-spanning networks of capital, goods, and people. At the same time, the city’s reinvention in the late-20th century as a “global city”—defined in large part by its deep embeddedness in world financial markets—represented a fundamental shift in the city’s economy, governance, demography, cultural life, and social relations. We will interrogate how this came to be by exploring New York’s historical role in global business, culture, and immigration, with attention to how local and national conditions have shaped the city’s relationship to the world. While critically analyzing how elites both in and outside New York have wielded power over its politics and institutions, readings and discussions will also center the voices of New Yorkers drawn from the numerous and diverse communities that make up this complex city.

Even in the midst of resurging nationalism, we continue to live in an intensely interconnected world where distant protests trigger local action, local pathogens seed global pandemics, global maneuverings cause local wars, faraway wars bring migrants and refugees to one’s community, global finance reshapes cityscapes, and a mounting climate crisis creates new living conditions everywhere. While studies of “globalization” often take a birds-eye view of the impacts of global interconnectivity, this course focuses also on localities and regions; and hones methodologies for investigating the complex and uneven ways global phenomena continually reshape communities and individual lives. This course is timely and urgent as the world confronts challenges that require intervention at local, regional, national, and global levels of coordination and collaboration. This moment requires us to think locally and globally at the same time, as we endeavor to understand, define, and address global problems. 

Students situated in or originating from diverse locations will collaborate with classmates to investigate a common global theme or challenge from multiple places and disciplinary perspectives, utilizing a variety of methodological approaches from oral history to data dives.  They will develop comparative and contextual perspectives on global issues by investigating how they resonate across different geographical scales; and develop final group projects that both investigate how issues reverberate across these scales and explore ways to address the challenges that confront the world.

This course supports the interdisciplinary MA in Global Thought by encouraging students to engage with the rich array of arts and culture events, museum exhibitions, and academic lectures and conferences at Columbia and beyond. It helps students maximize their intellectual enrichment during their time at Columbia and in New York City, and supports their research projects and plans for placement post-degree.

Students earn credit in this course by writing thoughtful and critically engaged reflection papers on the substance of lectures, workshops, and academic meetings attended at Columbia and other institutions in New York City and beyond. Three criteria will be introduced: 1) Writing analytically, 2) Thinking across disciplines, and 3) Critically reflecting on global issues through event selection and response papers.

Students who have completed undergraduate coursework through (or beyond) the intermediate II level (typically four or more semesters) in a language other than English can fulfill the language requirement by submitting:

• A transcript demonstrating completion of intermediate level II or above, maintaining a B average or above in all courses taken through the intermediate II level. Language classes used to fulfill the requirement must be taken for a letter grade.
• If the course title on the transcript does not indicate course level, students MUST also submit official course description(s) demonstrating that the courses taken are considered intermediate level or above at the institution where the courses were completed.

Students who need to meet the language-other-than-English requirement may take exams regardless of how they developed competence:

• Departmental placement exams: Columbia’s various language departments typically administer these exams in the week before either fall or spring semester classes begin (some exams are fall only). To meet the requirement, students must place into the fourth semester of study/intermediate II level course or beyond. This is CGT’s preferred testing option for students.
• Departmental reading proficiency exams: Administered by Columbia’s various language departments, these exams require students to translate academic texts in the selected language into English.

Alternative exams may be arranged in cases when an exam is not available via Columbia departments. We will work with heritage speakers (those who have learned a language informally through exposure at home rather than through formal instruction in a school setting) to determine appropriate testing methods.

Students cannot take language classes during their MA degree in order to fulfill the language requirement. Students should NOT take any language exams (Columbia or external) prior to admission. More information about acceptable testing methods and timelines will be provided to admitted students.