This course examines French art and visual culture from the eighteenth century to the Universal Exposition of 1931 through the lens of colonialism. Its geographic span encompasses North Africa, the Middle East, Polynesia, the Caribbean, the Americas. Our guiding concern will be to consider how key works of French art were generated within a continuously evolving visual rhetoric charged by issues of racial, cultural, and gender difference. Our objects of study will vary from popular consumables, to luxury goods and high art. We will look for ways to complicate the colonizer-colonized binary by locating sites of contestation and circuits of exchange between France and its colonies. Close reading of texts will be combined with rigorous, historically sensitive analysis of artworks throughout the semester.