Earth, Water, and the Anti-/Post- and De

This theory-driven seminar focuses on the artistic practices that engage two primordial elements, earth and water, developed in the wake of land and environmental art of the late 1960s–early70s. It centers the projects concerned with the politics of land and water in the aftermath of colonialism in the Americas, paying special attention to the work of those dispossessed by colonial projects—that is, Indigenous, Black, mestizo, and other racialized, diasporic, and/or migrant-descendant artists (i.e. Latinxs in the United States). For one, these practices are contextualized within the larger history of land/water representations and their attendant, often explicitly nationalist, ideologies as the attempts to remediate their effects and aftereffects. Two, these practices are analyzed vis-à-vis a wide range of anticolonial, postcolonial, and decolonial theories developed in the Americas and beyond in order to facilitate their historicization and theorization. It is the historical development of these theories that serves as a structuring tool for the course. In that vein, we consider the methodological question of how and when “theory” can be useful to art historical analysis, and how the concepts operative in the present can be applied and useful to the past, on the one hand. On the other, the seminar posits our current moment as a discrete era within a long history of struggles for self-determination variegated by distinct understandings of what the “Americas” are and how they were “made,” both of matter, peoples, and ideas. Simultaneously, it investigates concepts of time and temporality in order to illuminate and consider distinct understandings of human and other-than-human relations fundamental to the making and inhabiting of a “place.” Some of the authors discussed include Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, María Lugones, Sylvia Wynter, Rita Segato, Juan López Intzin, Glen Coulthard, Sheryl Lightfoot, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Eve Tuck and Wayne K. Yang.