As a way of organizing study on racialization, “visuality and racialization” is admittedly unwieldy. More often than not, it is taken to mean work that provides a simple or direct accounting of the impact of visual technologies on the narrative logics cohering racial difference. While this approach is arguably defensible, if not common, in this course we will try to avoid the pitfalls of historical determinism by emphasizing the dialectic between the early twentieth century proliferation of and fascination with visual forms and modernity’s ongoing tactics of racialization. Or, put another way, rather than trying to think early 20th century visuality and racialization as either a *new* instance of racialization impacted by a sudden incorporation or awareness of new visual technologies, or—just as reductive—to ignore the importance of visual shifts altogether, we will instead regard racial visibility as consonant with, but not entirely reducible to both the pressures and performances of race in new visual forms, as well as modernity’s racial formulations. In short, we will think visuality as a developing tactic of modernity, and the early 20th century as a point of a critical shift.

In the first couple of weeks, we will discuss a range of influential theorizations of the visual cultures and practices in the late 19th and early 20th century. We will try to grasp the organizing claims of this body of theoretical work before we move on to consider how more recent re-considerations of the significance of visuality have expanded or tested these theorizations. Many of these later works will help us to figure out how to emphasize a racial typology familiar from, but not reducible to, both 19th century cultural forms and late US modernist depthlessness. Because we cannot hope to exhaust the textual or literary effects of visuality-as-tactics in every instance, we will turn in the last few weeks of the quarter to focus on the specific (and famous) period of visual racialization in thirties US culture, including especially an attention to the pronounced connection between photographic, filmic and illustrative national projects focused on the figure of the racialized migrant or laborer and the development of various literary-cultural tableaus and narrativizations of the modern racial figure . Assignments in this course will include a collaborative (two person) presentation on a primary text; an annotated bibliography over the presentation; an abstract of the final essay; and a final, conference-length paper.