This course will provide students with a genealogy of the newly-expanding field of visual culture studies through a postcolonial optic. We will take as our point of departure the 1936 essays by Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin, on the function of art under modernity. These two foundational essays, written in the force field of the social and historical contradictions within Europe that were finding their expression in fascism and totalitarianism, articulated new and urgent questions about the relationship of technology to art, of aesthetics to politics, and of knowledge to representation. In this seminar we will explore the implications of this questioning for global visual culture. How is perception constituted by the serial nature of modern images? What are the relationships between materiality and the image, history and simulacra, power and looking? How must we rethink and revise notions of form, aesthetics, the picturesque, and the sublime in light of colonial and postcolonial visual culture? The aim here is not only to analyze the production of the “Western” gaze upon the “East,” but also to explore, in Rey Chow’s words, “the fact that the ‘East,’ too, is a spectator who is equally caught up in the dialectic of seeing.”