Respond to this 2019 lecture delivered by art historian John R. Blakinger (Links to an external site.) titled “A Contest of Images: American Art as Culture War, The Stones of Civil War.”
https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/terra-foundation-lectures-american-art-2019-contest-images-american-art-culture-war-4 (Links to an external site.)
Transcriipt:
http://media.podcasts.ox.ac.uk/arthist/general/20190605_hoa_blakinger_4.srt (Links to an external site.)
ANSWER EACH OF THE FOLLOWING PROMPTS USING 300 OR LESS WORDS FOR EACH PROMPT. Do not use a title page, do not provide an introduction or conclusion. Simply answer the prompts.
1) Identify one or two central point(s) made. What is being critiqued?
2) How is this value being promoted or critiqued? What methodology is utilized? What evidence is provided?
3) What further questions do you have? What topics might you approach differently?
Your work should be saved in A MICROSOFT WORD, double spaced, page numbered, with a heading (the name of the student, date, email and the class the student is enrolled in) and endnotes.
You are required to identify two core terms from your readings and class discussions (noted in bold and provided with a definition) in addition to citing at least two course articles or links.
NOTE SYLLABUS GUIDELINES FOR CLASS ASSIGNMENTS: All class assignments should contain the name of the student, date, email and the class the student is enrolled in within the heading of the paper.
Please save the document following these guidelines: A) Your final product will be submitted via Canvas and B) labeled in the following manner: Student last name, first name, CE (for Critical Essay, for example…) Winter 2022. Example: MithloNancyCEwinter2022.
Points will be subtracted if the student fails to label their assignment correctly.
Remember that a lecture may contain several points made. Do not attempt to address ALL arguments, focus in on a primary theme or debate the speaker is addressing.
What is a “core term”? Core terms are those words and phrases that emerge from your readings, class discussions and course materials. While this course will develop a “keyterms” list over the course of the quarter, you are not limited to these. You may even provide a core term from your readings in a different class or context. Remember to make clear the meaning of your term by providing a brief definition.
GRADING RUBRIC
25 points – Follow instructions correctly. What is being critiqued? How is this value being critiqued? What methodology is utilized? What evidence is provided? What further questions do you have? What topics might you approach differently?
25 points – Effective use of scholarly literature. You are required to identify TWO core terms (noted in bold and provided with a definition) as well as cite at least TWO course articles. Citations are required for the articles, preferably in the form of endnotes.
25 points – Technical issues – Grammar, document saved correctly, word count correct, numbered.
25 points – Depth and effectiveness of analysis. Remember that a lecture may contain several points made. Do not attempt to address ALL arguments, focus in on a primary theme or debate the speaker is addressing
Keywords to choose from:
Colorism- Within-group and between-group prejudice in favor of lighter skin color—what feminist author Alice Walker calls “colorism”—is a global cultural practice.
https://www.learningforjustice.org/magazine/fall-2015/whats-colorism
Positionality – Positionality refers to the how differences in social position and power shape identities and access in society.
Subjectivity
Performance
Separatism
Anti-racism
Iconoclasm – the action of attacking or assertively rejecting cherished beliefs and institutions or established values and practices.
the imperial gaze—the look that seeks to dominate, subjugate, and colonize.
non-white subjectivity
Internalized racism
Self-determination
self-love as a revolutionary intervention that undermines
practices of domination – hooks
conventional ways of seeing (Mithlo “conventional narrative”)
colonizing gaze
bell hooks “Imperialist White Supremacist Heteropatriarchy
Settler colonialism
historical forces that shaped these monuments when they were created
Beetham essay: “[The courthouse square] is …a site that has been associated with lynching, the terroristic nighttime violence that was used to enforce white supremacist rule during the years following the Civil War. The Confederate soldier monument, an emblem of white Southern manhood that recalls a war fought to perpetuate slavery, is implicated in this highly charged environment. Inscribed with the names of soldiers, it is a symbol of pride for the descendants of Confederate soldiers and a source of pain for the descendants of those they oppressed and enslaved.”
“If America’s Confederate monuments are to be reinterpreted in any way, change will have to come at a local level, mirroring the grassroots movement through which the monuments were first created. In this process, the role of the public historian is to offer insight into the historical forces that shaped these monuments when they were created and the role they have played in the nation’s fraught racial history.”
August 2017 Klansmen and White nationalists in Charlottesville, Va. violently protest movement to remove monument to Robert E. Lee. In 2019, Biden references this in his presidential campaign launch. On September 12, 2020, the monument was removed.
2021 Mellon-funded report “National Monument Audit” – Monument Lab defines a monument as “a statement of power and presence in public.”
– “The commemorative landscape is dominated by monuments to figures who would be considered white, male, and wealthy in our common understandings today.” Of the top 50
individuals depicted in monuments today half owned slaves. Only 6% were women and 10% Black or Indigenous.
– Violence is the most dominant subject of commemoration across the nation (The ratio of records that refer to war and peace monuments is 13:1. The ratio of war to love is 17:1. The ratio of war to care is 59:1)
– The biggest surges of Confederate monuments were dedicated between 1900 and 1920, along with the rise of Jim Crow and a second wave of symbols that marked the resistance to the gains of the civil rights era in the latter half of the twentieth century.
2016 Southern Poverty Law Center report: “Whose Heritage?”
– There are more than 700 Confederate monuments and statues on public property throughout the country, the vast majority in the South.
– There were two major periods in which the dedication of Confederate monuments and other symbols spiked — the first two decades of the 20th century and during the civil rights movement.
– The “heritage, not hate” argument ignores the near-universal heritage of African Americans who were enslaved by the millions in the South and later subjected to brutal oppression under the white supremacist regime of Jim Crow. Our democracy is based on
equality under the law, and public entities should not prominently display symbols that undermine that concept and alienate an entire segment of the population
– Hate groups didn’t transform the flag into a symbol of white supremacy. The Confederacy was founded on the very idea of white supremacy, and soldiers who served under its banner — regardless of their individual honor or motives — fought to defend the institution of slavery.
– our government, which is supposed to serve all citizens, shouldn’t endorse a symbol that represents the oppression of a group of its citizens. This is not a freedom-of-expression
issue.
Artistic response:
– Kehinde Wiley’s Anti-Confederate Memorial (unveiled in Times Square, installed in Richmond, Virginia), mimics Confederate monuments that were erected in the city during the rise of Jim Crow. “The monuments in Richmond point to a century of white supremacy. He hoped that, by using the visual language of memorialization to depict the people who were oppressed, he could show that the city’s values have changed.”
