Cameron McCarthy (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Art in the Postcolonial Imagination: Notes Towards Globalizing Curriculum and Aesthetics

5:30-7:15 pm

Dominant critical traditions of thought on the status of art have led to the “forked road” of cultural Marxism and neo-Marxism: the anti-populism of the Frankfurt School and Habermas versus the populism of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies. Drawing on artwork from Latin America and the Caribbean, McCarthy shows how the postcolonial imagination dynamically engages with systems of domination. Destabilizing received traditions of identity, association and feeling, it offers new starting-points for affiliation and community. It invites a conversation over curriculum change amidst the tumult of globalization and the reassertion in some quarters of a feral nationalism.

Cameron McCarthy is Communications Scholar and University Scholar in the Department of Educational Policy, Leadership and Organization (EPOL) and in the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Professor McCarthy teaches courses in globalization studies in education, postcolonialism, mass communications theory and cultural studies in the Global Studies in Education Program in EPOL where he severed for many years as the director. His latest books include the coauthored and award-winning Class Choreographies, Elite Schools and Globalization (Palgrave, 2018) and Spaces of New Colonialism (Peter Lang, 2020).