This course takes a cultural approach to connected histories and more contemporary developments of (post)colonial national identity formations, U.S. empire, and globalization during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through the lenses of gender, race, and appearance. We will examine visual and performative cultural arenas such as beauty pageants, advertising, mass media, film, and video and investigate how discourses of racial and gendered aesthetics functioned in structuring and maintaining colonial forces and empire.
