Deco Depression: Representing Race, Gender, and Sexuality between the Wars

Course Description

Summary

The raucous and repressive but also radical and recalcitrantly white supremacist period c. 1918-1941 has many names. In the U.S. this generation-long span between the two World Wars encompasses or overlaps, e.g. The Harlem Renaissance, The Jazz Age, The Depression, Prohibition, The Dust Bowl, The Progressive Era, and Jim Crow. In this visual studies course, we’ll investigate and analyze emerging forms of cultural production born out of an America at odds with its future, its past, and the lives its increasingly diverse population imagine for themselves. Among our concerns: images of the "new woman"; tropes of “white passing”; photography as documentary/art; performances of transness and queerness; religious revivalism; musicals and talkies, etc.