VISST-3000 seminars continue developing students' visual analysis and research skills while providing students the opportunity for in-depth study of the visual/structural artifacts associated with a particular topic, region, or movement. Students will also engage with the relevant primary/secondary literature for the specific topic/theme. Courses will pay particular attention to the larger cultural, historical, and theoretical/ideological contexts in which the visual artifacts and structures under consideration were created. This course cannot fulfill the VISST-2000 requirement.SECTION DESCRIPTIONFor more than 2000 years, the Silk Road(s) carried more than commercial goods through Asia (more accurately through Eurasia): It was an instrument of globalization before the term was coined and deployed to describe the transnational flow of capital, ideologies, politics, media, and cultural practices in our own epoch of late capitalism. This course will offer an historical overview of the role that the Silk Road played in the transmission of religions, cultures and the arts from their local origins to all other regions of the entire continent of Asia (in its expanded sense and not the modern colonial definition of just East and South Asia). The main focus, however, will be on various traditional and contemporary artistic practices of each region through a close examination of exemplary cases from the eastern, southern, central, and western parts of the continent, as well as a serious consideration of their interconnected-ness. 

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