As the noted art historian W.J.T. Mitchell once asked: “is landscape painting the ‘sacred silent language’ of Western Imperialism?” To some, the landscape, painted or otherwise, might appear to be a harmless if thoroughly commodified genre of artistic production, the purview of Sunday painters and travel influencers. But Mitchell’s provocative question points to a much darker and complex history. From the paintings of the Dutch Golden Age to the colonial panorama, the rise and fall of the landscape as a major genre in Western visual culture is deeply intertwined with the history of Euro-American imperialism. If, as Edward Said once remarked, imperialism is ultimately about the possession and control of land, then the landscape, which offers the land up for consumption by a singular controlling gaze, might just be the imperial genre par excellence. How, then, did the landscape, broadly understood as a medium of cultural expression, contribute to the formation, justification and consolidation of the Euro-American imperialist project? How might indigenous populations reappropriate the landscape as a vehicle for emancipation? And what becomes of the landscape after formal decolonization?
In this course, we will explore the relationship between landscape and empire focusing on England, France, the United States, Palestine, and Algeria. We will consider metropolitan and colonial landscapes in relation to each other and across a variety of media including painting, photography, architecture, landscaping, and cartography. We will begin with a study of landscape representation in Western Art from its emergence in the Renaissance to its apotheosis in the nineteenth century, before attending to its decline and multifarious reconfigurations from the mid-twentieth century onward. We will look at the Dutch and Italian landscapes of the early modern period, the works of John Constable and J.M.W. Turner, the English garden, the Hudson River and Barbizon Schools of painting, the Orientalist landscape, nineteenth century frontier photography in the American West, and Native American art. Closer to our own times, we will attend to the afterlives of the imperial landscape in both high and low art, from the kitsch paintings of Bob Ross, Thomas Kincaid, and the Florida Highwaymen, to the conceptual explorations of Land Art, the New Topographics, and Forensic Architecture. Finally, we will ask what climate change, growing political instability, and the imperialist tendencies of the present entail for the landscape moving forward. Readings will be drawn from a broad range of disciplines like art history and theory, geography, history, and landscape studies and include authors such as Edward Said, W. J.T. Mitchell, Denis Cosgroves, John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Eyal Weizman, William Cronon, Jill Casid, and Ariella Aïsha Azoulay among others.
