COMS 893 Advanced Special Topic: The Image Wars

Offered: 2021 /2
Credits: 3

This course explores the cultural, political, and epistemological importance of visual media, focusing especially on four domains that have been radically altered over the course of the past couple centuries through the development of new instruments and techniques for image-making: religion, art, science, and politics. The term “image wars” offers a productive lens through which one can investigate this interdisciplinary terrain of visual culture on a global scale. How and why have some images become objects of passionate love or hate? How and why have institutions and social groups called for the restriction, prohibition, or destruction of particular types of images? Is there an underlying relationship between visuality and violence that might explain why images (or conversely, efforts to banish images) are so readily deployed within larger struggles for legitimacy and domination? What about the power of images to ‘tell the truth’ about the world(s) they purport to represent – might their very rhetoric of objectivity constitute a sort of image war, or perhaps better stated, a sort of war via images over truth?

Over the course, we shall address these (and related) questions from a broad historical and cross-cultural perspective, tracing the origins of diverse practices and norms of image-making and image-destruction, from antiquity to the early modern period of missionary conquest, imperial expansion, and iconoclastic violence, both within and outside the theatre of Christian Europe. But the bulk of our course will be devoted to the more recent history of development of what some authors refer to as our modern ‘crisis of (visual) representation’: a paradox in which the referential functions of visual knowledge, and in particular, the mediation of vision, have increasingly been called into question, at the very same time that image-making technologies have been radically expanding their reach into public spaces and everyday lives. Indeed, as we will examine in this course, the rise of global modernity can be defined in no small measure through the proliferation of new struggles over images, and new ways of exercising visualized violence, from the surveillance and ‘distant-viewing’ capabilities of mediatized weaponry (such as drones), to the policing of sexual representation (through censorship of pornography), to the airing of public controversies over ‘blasphemous’ art, to the proliferation of new forms of visually-mediated protest and witnessing in times of war, atrocity, and political struggle (from the 2001 destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan; to the release of photos of tortured detainees in Abu Ghraib prison, Iraq in 2004; to the 2005 Danish Cartoon Affair; to the 2015 attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris; to the protests over Confederate Army (and other controversial) monuments inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement in the USA, Canada, and the UK, beginning in 2016, to name only some of the more prominent recent cases). Students will pursue these topics in the context of engagement with the course readings as well as a research essay focused on a case study (or theoretical issue) of their choosing.

Special instructions: This course is open to a limited number of PhD students from outside the Department of Communication Studies, subject to permission of the course instructor. Students interested in registering for this course should contact Dr. Stolow directly.

Contact: Jeremy Stolow