Cultural Memory and the Politics of Visualizing the Past
Full course description
In the course “Cultural memory and the politics of visualizing the past,” students will learn to become aware of how what is considered ‘past’ has been filtered through structures of power. Which voices, sources, events and people are remembered, and which are lost to oblivion, is a highly political question. We will explore how aesthetic and artistic narrations of history speak to counter-archives of memory, including the afterlife of slavery, embodied trauma, and legacies of crisis such as with AIDS. Our interest will be in reading along with scholars who have developed methods for grasping deposits of marginalized lived experience through listening to images (Campt), contrapuntal reading (Said), unlearning imperialism (Azoulay), wake work (Sharpe), reading queer ephemera (Muñoz), and distilling structures of feeling (Williams) such as feeling brown and down, queer and backwards. We will apply these alternative methods for historical analysis to cases of diary writing, poetry, performance, painting, music, photography, and scraps of archival records.
Some of the examples of cultural memory work we will encounter include:
- Juliette Singh, No Archive can Restore You. Punctum Books, 2018
- Saidiya Hartman, Wayward lives, beautiful experiments: Intimate histories of riotous Black girls, troublesome women, and queer radicals. WW Norton & Company, 2019.
- Eliis Martin and Zach Ozma, eds. We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan (1961-1991). Nightboat, 2019.
- Tourmaline and Sasha Wortzel, dirs. Happy Birthday, Marsha!, Frameline, 2018.
- Morgan M. Page, One from the Vaults: A Trans History Podcast, SoundCloud, 2017-present.
- NourbeSe Philip, Zong! Weslyan University Press, 2008.
- Koleke Putuma, Collective Amnesia. Cape Town: uHlanga, 2017
- Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis: Grey Wolf Press, 2014.
- Morrigan Phillips, “The Long Memory,” in Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, eds. Adrienne Maree Brown and Walidah Imarisha. Oakland: AK Press, 2015, pp. 57-78.
- Crip Camp (2020) Directed by James Lebrecht, Nicole Newnham. Available via Netflix or for free here. https://youtu.be/OFS8SpwioZ4
Course objectives
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To familiarize students with theoretical approaches and methodological components within cultural memory studies concerned with minoritarian groups and affect/emotion: e.g. Nora, Stoler, Rigney, Trouillot, Said, Azoulay, Sharpe, Hartman, Muñoz, Mbembe, Campt, Arondekar.
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To provide students with an introduction into archives (theory) and memory, especially in relation to power.
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To introduce students to the political and academic assessment of the post-colonial dimension of cultural memory, and the queer dimension of historical scholarship.
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To introduce students to alternative concepts and methods of historical analysis and to become competent in applying them to a range of cultural and archival materials.
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To enable students to identify and analyze the role of race, sexuality, gender, ability in constructions of cultural remembrance (related to imperialism, heterosexism, cisgenderism, ableism).
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To analyze debates connected to contested memorial monuments, literature and the arts.
Prerequisites
HUM1003 Cultural Studies I or HUM2003 The Making of Crucial Differences, and some knowledge/interest in close reading of literary and/or visual texts.