Maria Carrion

Ideas of nature that formed globally between 1400 and 1800 intersect with the emergence of the Baroque, and represent a profound field of force configuring human-environmental relations into the present. In many ways, we’re haunted by the shocks and aftershocks of this period: colonization, enslavement, extraction, genocide, pandemic, and mass death reshaped the world. This course provides students with an interdisciplinary point of departure for considering these histories through visual art, literature, and music. Readings and object engagements will vary, but will begin with critical theory oriented towards contemporary concerns but that parallel the historical arc of the course, namely Mark Payne's Hontology: Depressive Anthropology and the Shame of Life (Zer0 Books, 2018). Artists and works studied and that we will study together will focus on those represented in the Art Institute collection, and include Salvator Rosa, Peter Paul Rubens, and Caravaggio, alongside the music of Jacopo Peri and dramatic works of Shakespeare. Yet the course expands the focus of Baroque inquiry, as less a movement than way of thinking at the threshold of creativity, emotion, and awe, to work with diverse contemporaneous modes of indigenous expression in the Hemispheric Americas, including Nahua art produced in the lands now known as Mexico and Pueblo and Diné (Navajo) art created or that otherwise indexes the period under consideration. Course work will include a journal of visual analysis; four one-page essays; an annotated research bibliography; and final seminar paper of eight to ten pages.