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VISUALITY / ALTERITY WORKING GROUP The Visuality and Alterity Group at the University
of California – Berkeley, consisting of graduate students and faculty
from the Departments of Ethnic Studies, Art Practice, Anthropology and
Performance Studies is developing an interdisciplinary conversation on
theories and practices of visual experience and production in the context
of multiple sites of alterity, including culture, race and gender. While
our group seeks to further understand the terms visuality, alterity and
transnationalism, we are working with the following definitions: Visuality
is defined as encompassing the study and practices of visual experience,
including intentional practices, such as art and visual culture, as well
as informal, quotidian visual experience of human environments. Rather
than visual culture, we use visuality because it promotes an interdisciplinary
discussion of the visual, and leads us towards what W.J.T. Mitchell would
call “showing seeing” across broad spectrums of geo-political
and philosophical sites.1 Our inclusion of the concept of alterity, from
philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’ work on knowing “the Other”
reflects our commitment to decolonial readings of cultural and aesthetic
difference.2 Alterity is rooted in the different geo-political locations
of people and their visual and artistic languages. Thus, we are working
on understanding the embedded epistemologies of different ways of seeing
that exceed Western discursive formations. Transnationalism refers to
this commitment to creating analytical frameworks that cross geo-political
borders of nation-states and nationalist discourses. We seek to understand
visuality in the context of writers and thinkers who write a wide range
of disciplinary, national, cultural and trans-local sites. The disciplines
that we draw from include post-colonial studies, comparative ethnic studies,
sociology, gender and women’s studies, queer studies, art history,
art education, visual culture, philosophy and aesthetics. Our interest
is in pluralizing the understanding of visual practices in alternative
cultural formations in order to facilitate new, intersectional and relational
connections between communities, histories and discourses. We are putting
different scopic regimes, the systems that culturally code the visual
and their embedded epistemologies, in new, comparative conversation with
each other. This is a transnational discourse on visuality that recognizes
and theorizes new global circuits of information exchange and power. The
group is currently engaged in a monthly reading and discussion group;
work in progress paper presentations by group members; video screenings
and discussions; and a fall and spring visiting lecture, which will be
open to the public.
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