American Mystics

This seminar will consider the role of mysticism in American art and culture. Long denigrated as irrational or escapist, mysticism in fact offers a site from which to investigate and challenge entrenched assumptions of linear time, historical positivism, hierarchies of taste, and rationality that remain the epistemic grounding of art history. Topics covered will include Transcendentalism¿s debt to Buddhism; the Aesthetic Movement; Aleister Crowley, Kenneth Anger, and occultism; Rastafarianism; Afrofuturism; psychedelia, drugs, and the counterculture, among many others. Readings will include work by Max Weber; Theodor Adorno; Sylvia Wynter; Toni Morrison; Marcel Mauss; and Ashon Crawley. Special attention will be paid to issues of race, ethnicity, and decolonizing methodologies.