Semester:
Offered:
Vishal Khandelwal (Department of History of Art and Architecture)
First-Year Seminar 65I credits (fall term) Enrollment: Limited to 12
A city is a strange organism in which many kinds of realities exist alongside each other. In addition to containing the buildings and infrastructures of everyday life, a city suggests numerous meanings to the people who comprise and navigate it. This seminar will consider some of these meanings by analyzing architecture and urban development; artworks that represent everyday life; and films that showcase the modern city. How do people build cities in relation to their needs? How and why do specific urban spaces cater to entertainment and excitement? Where do emotions such as love, longing, or fear make themselves apparent within the textures of cities? How does urban life give rise to inclusions and exclusions? In what ways do artworks and everyday objects register urban and rural realities, fantasies, and memories? And how do we study and talk about the built and unbuilt infrastructures that shape and enable cities and subjectivities? Our core examples will draw from South Asian cities and diasporic South Asian lives, and our readings will come from disciplines including architectural history, art history, urban studies, and anthropology. At stake will be a variety of terms and concepts that we will use to think, write, and reflect about cities, the kinds of activities that take place within them, and the types of transactions that structure our urban experiences as well as the experiences of those we study. We will strive to move beyond conceptions of urban life that privilege the ideals and aspirations of only a few, and will question what has historically constituted the urban itself in relation to the non-urban. A mandatory field trip to the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University (Waltham, MA) is included as part of this seminar.