Photography and Human Rights MCM1503R Ariella Azoulay
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Photography and Human Rights MCM1503R Ariella Azoulay Thursdays from 4-6:20pm Screenings on Tue + Wed nights from 7-11 Office Hours: Wed. 10:30-12 and by appointment In the context of the current abundance of “images of atrocity” showing global human rights violations, this course will return to one milestone exhibition, The Family of Man (1955) as a potential archive containing “visual clauses” of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Through this exhibition, some subsequent photographic examples and related films, we will ask new questions about the documentary genre, about the role of imagination in photography, and about the use of photography in studying history, including a history of a potential past that never was and of the actual present that should not be. Readings will include visual and political theory, and human rights documents (declarations, conventions and regulations) and visual material. REQUIRED TEXTS: Edward Steichen, 1955. The Family of Man, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mark Mazower, 2009. No Enchanted Palace – The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations, Princeton University Press The Family of Man 1. Eric J. Sandeen, Picturing An Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950s America, Albuquerque: U New Mexico P, 1995, pp. 11-94. 2. Eric Sandeen, "'The Show You See With Your Heart," in Back and Schmidt-Linsenhoff, 101-121 3. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, "The Family of Man: Refurbishing Humanism for a Postmodern Age," in The Family of Man – 1955-2001, Humanism and Postmodernism (Ed. Back and Schmidt-Linsenhoff), Jonas Verlag, pp. 29-55 4. Lili C. Bezner, "Subtle subterfuge: The flawed nobility of Edward Steichen's Family of Man," in Photography and politics in America : from the New Deal into the Cold War, Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999, pp. 121-174 Screening: Interview Günter Gauss with Hannah Arendt (English subtitles), 1964 Double Exposure – The Story of Margaret Bourke-White, A Lawrence Schiller Film "The Solid Rock of a Universal Human Nature” 5. Roland Barthes, "The Great Family of Man," in Mythologies, New York: Hill and Wang, 1972, 100-102 6. Allan Sekula, "The Traffic in Photographs, " Art Journal 41:1, Spring 1981, 15-25 7. Wendy Kozol, "'The Kind of People Who Make Good Americans': Nationalism and Life’s Family Ideal," in Ardis Cameron, ed., Looking for America: The Visual Production of Nation and People, Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005 8. Ann McClintock, 1995. “The White Family of Man”, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, Routledge, pp. 232-257. Screening: Alain Resnais, Night and Fog Alain Resnais (screenplay by Marguerite Duras), Hiroshima Mon Amour The Photographic Literacy Open Lesson 9. Peter Bacon Hales, 2001. “Imagining The Atomic Age: Life and the Atom”, Looking At Life Magazine (Ed. Erika Doss), Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 103-122. 10. Barbie Zelizer, 1998. Remembering to Forget – Holocaust Memory Through The Camera's Eye, The University of Chicago Press, pp. 86-140. 11. John Loengard, 1998. Photographers – What They Saw, Bulfinch PressBook, pp. 162-173. 12. Gerard Daniel Cohen, 2012. In War's Wake – Europe's Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order, Oxford University Press, pp. 3-34. Screening: Roberto Rossellini, Trilogy of War: Rome – Open City (1945), Paisan (1946), Germany year Zero (1948). Imagining Rights: 13. Lynn Hunt Inventing Human Rights, Norton, pp. 70-146 14. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948 http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml 15. Olympe de Gouges, 1791. “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Female Citizen” http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/americanstudies/lavender/decwom2.html Screening: Eric Rohmer, The Lady and the Duke The “International” as a Realm of Governance 16. Mark Mazower, 2009. No Enchanted Palace – The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations, Princeton University Press, pp. 17. Wiktor Osiatyʼnski, “Short history of Human Rights”, Human Rights and their limits, Cambridge, pp. 1- 69. 18. Blake Stimson, 2006. The Pivot of The World – Photography and Its Nation, Cambridge, The MIT Press, pp. 13-104. Screening: Billy Wilder, One, Two, Three Camera, Archive, Spectator - The Materiality of the Photographic Human Rights Discourse 19. Achille Mbembe, 2002. “The Power of the Archive and its Limits”, Refiguring the Archive, David Philip Publisher, pp. 19-26. 20. Allan Sekula, 1992. “The Body and the Archive”, The Contest of Meaning – Critical Histories of Photography, MIT Press, pp. 343-389. 21. Celia Lury, "The Family of Man," in Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory, and identity, Routledge 1998, 41-75. 22. Ariella Azoulay, 2012. Archive, http://www.politicalconcepts.org/2011/archive 23. Ariella Azoulay, 2011. “Photography without Borders.” The Routledge International Handbook of Human Rights (Ed. Thomas Cushman), Routledge, 2011. Screening: Roberto Rossellini, Trilogy of War: Paisan (1946), Germany year Zero (1948). Declaring Rights The Universal Declaration of Human Rights 24. Samuel Moyn, 2012. “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 in the History of Cosmopolitanism”, unpublished lecture. 25. Mary Ann Glendon, "Knowing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights," Notre Dame Law 26. Review 73, May 1998, 1153-1176 Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New, New York: Random House, 2001, 143-219, 235-241 Screening: Sylvia Pankhurst, Everything is Possible Who Declares Rights? Whose Rights? 27. Jacques Rancière, "Who is the subject of the rights of man?," South Atlantic Quarterly 103: 2/3, Spring/Summer 2004, 297-310 28. Wendy Brown - "Suffering the paradoxes of rights", in Left Legalism/Left Critique, ed. Janet E. Halley, 420-34, Durham, Duke University 29. Austin Sarat and Thomas Kearns, "The Unsettled Status of Human Rights," in Sarat and Kearns, eds., Human Rights, Ann Arbor: U Michigan P, 2002, 1-24 Conflicting Rights 30. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 1840. “What is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and Government”, The Human Rights Reader (Ed. Micheline R. Ishay), pp. 208-214 31. Louis Blanc, 1848. “On the Material Basis for Rights”, The Human Rights Reader (Ed. Micheline R. Ishay), pp. 215-218. 32. Eleanor Roosvelt, 1952. “The Universal Validity of Man's Right to Self-Determination” Thr refugees rights, The Human Rights Reader (Ed. Micheline R. Ishay), pp283-287. .ugeed”, The Human Rights Reader (Edכe Status of reיUnited Nations Convention Relating to t" .33 Micheline R. Ishay), pp. 383-384. 34. Micheline R. Ishay, "Human Rights and Documents: A Brief Historical Narrative”, The Human Rights Reader, pp. 475-499. 35. John Locke, 1690. “On Property”, pp. 116-120. 36. J.J.Rousseau, 1756/ “On the Limits of Property”, 119-123. The Commons 37. Gerard Winstanley, 1649, “A Declaration From The Poor Oppressed of England”, The Human Rights Reader (Ed. Micheline R. Ishay), pp. 114-116. 38. Laura Westra, 2011. Human Rights – The Commons and the Collective, UBC Press, pp. 7-93. 39. Anthony Oliver-Smith, 2010. Defying Displacement – Grassroots Resistance and the Critique of Development, University of Texas Press, pp 1-41. Screening: Long Night's Journey into Day – South Africa's Search for Truth and Reconciliation, directed by: Frances Reid and Deborah Hoffman Course Requirements: Attentive attendance at all seminars and screening, reading all the texts at least once before class are required. Lead class discussion of 1-2 of the course readings. Post at least 5 times weekly reading responses/questions for discussion on Canvas by Wednesday at 5pm. Present briefly (10-15 minutes) a draft for the final paper. Final paper should consist of 10-12 pages. Regardless of approach, all papers should position themselves in relation to existing scholarship and course material. Grading: Class Participation, posts: 40% Final Paper (10-12 pages): 60% .