This module considers American documentary and its afterlives. Offering an in depth study of the emergence of documentary in the US around the rise of the New Deal, it asks students to consider claims being made for documentary work by art historians and contemporary artists. Did documentary rise and fall in a matter of decade? Is the emergence of documentary necessarily aligned with economic and social crisis? Are we currently experiencing the 'return' or 'reinvention' of documentary? The seminar, in turn, has a double focus: to study and understand the moment of American documentary's 'invention' in the 1930s and to think through how and why that invention has been reinvented, repressed and historicized.

Opening with a consideration of the wealth of recent debates about documentary, we will carve out a working definition of a document and/or documentary. This definition will frame the study of the diverse range of photographic, filmic and journalistic practices that emerged in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century-from Robert Flaherty's ethnographies and Lewis Hine's work for the National Child Labor Committee to the films of The Workers Film and Photo League. With an expanded understanding of documentary and its discourse in place, students will then be asked to focus their attention on a few celebrated books and films produced between 1937 and 1941. Central to our concerns will be the collaborative nature of documentary work-photographers and filmmakers worked with novelists, poets, journalists and sociologists on their productions-as well as the ways in which the work we have come to call documentary circulated-namely, on the page or screen, in print. In short, we will consider how this work produced and defined its or a public.

Finally, the seminar will close by returning to our initial questions about the so-called 'reinvention' of documentary now by thinking through the legacies and afterlives of documentary in the 1960s and 1970s. Throughout the course we will test our understanding of documentary against histories and theories of modernism, the avant-garde, mass media and propaganda. We will also consider the ethical and political debates about documentary and its uses, both past and present. Students, in short, will be asked to develop a historical understanding of documentary and to think critically about the ways in which it has been historicized.