ARTH 1141 - FWS: Who Owns Culture? Propaganda, Theft, Museums & Heritage Wars

Fall. 3 credits. Letter grades only.

First-Year Writing Seminar.

E. Hahn.

Why do people care about art and history? And how do people use public displays of art for political purposes? These questions will frame our investigations into “heritage policy,” in which the arts’ power to represent identities has become the center of intense international debates and controversies. These issues affected propaganda in Nazi Germany and Sadaam Hussein’s Iraq, encouraged tourism in “developing” countries that comodified historic sites, led Italy to accuse major American museums of supporting the theft of valuable antiquities and sparked violent conflicts between Cambodia and Thailand. By critiquing scholarship, films and online media, students will engage with a range of rhetorical methods for creating convincing arguments, analyzing both textual and visual sources, and better understanding their relationship to their own “cultural heritage.” (FWS)