ENGL 7870 Special Topics
Quilts of Gee's Bend in Context
10:00–12:40 W
Alicia Carroll
The stunning quilts in the exhibit The Quilts of Gee’s Bend, on view at Auburn’s Jule Collins Smith Museum for the duration of this course, were produced by an exclusively African American Alabama community for a utilitarian purpose under great economic and political hardship. The purpose of this course will be to examine the cultural work done by the collection, exhibition, and consumption of these quilts, noting the transformation of the category of “ Alabama quilt” from regional artifact to high art. In examining the quilts’ production, collection, exhibition, and consumption, we will decode, amongst many others, constructs such as “distinction,” “authenticity,” and “aura,” and the role which such constructs play in the exchange of art, power, and identity in our culture.
Becoming intimately familiar with reading the quilts in the exhibit themselves, we will also encounters texts such as reviews, “oral histories,” and films as well as literary representations of utilitarian quilts such as those in Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” or Lucille Clifton’s Quilting: Poems: 1987-1990. Foundational Cultural Studies works will provide crucial methodologies and theories as related to but distinct from New Historicist or Marxist criticism. Important authors will include: Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, James Clifford, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Michelle Wallace and Janice Radway. We will likely supplement an anthology such as The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During, with reviews of the exhibit, films, and The Quilts of Gees Bend, the exhibition catalogue that accompanies the Gee’s Bend exhibit. A WebCT site, finally, will provide access to historical documents and photos, online articles and reviews, and oral histories and interviews.
Clearly, having the exhibit at the JCS museum in Auburn provides us with a unique opportunity to witness the work of exhibition first hand. Our class will be run as a traditional seminar, however students will also have the opportunity to meet at the museum or occasionally with faculty in the art department. Additionally, at the first class meeting, students will be given a scale model of the JCS exhibition space and asked to construct their own exhibitions over time. These should shift and change throughout the semester and should provide you with a resource in which you may experiment with making meaning, and its consequences, yourself. As the semester proceeds, students will be asked to develop these scale exhibitions as their knowledge of both the quilts and the processes of production, consumption, and representation increases. The choices made here, it is hoped, will result in interesting final presentations. Students will be responsible for presenting two oral reports on theoretical readings. One seminar paper and one final presentation will be required.
Texts:
The Cultural Studies Reader , Simon During, Ed.
Requirements:
Two short presentations on theoretical readings. One final presentation. Seminar paper.