Fall 2024 Graduate Course

SPAN696: The Politics of Memory:
Major Works, Debates, and Questions in Memory Studies
Tu 3:00PM – 5:30PM

Course Description:
Memory activism and the politics of cultural memory spaces and practices have become a lightning rod for fervent public debate from both the Left and the Right. Should historical statues to racist figures and pasts be left as they are or removed and destroyed? Should they be rehomed in statue parks intended as final resting places for disgraced statues? Or should they be left but with additional plaques and memorials added to provide further context? These questions are often linked to deeper questions about truth, history, and justice. In the aftermath of violence and atrocity, how do individuals and communities reckon with the past and mend the social fabric? What do justice and reconciliation mean, and are they ever truly possible?

This graduate seminar examines these important questions through study of the key scholarship, debates, and major contemporary works in the interdisciplinary field of memory studies. Our inquiry will also take us into other areas of study that intersect with memory studies in significant and interesting ways, including genocide and atrocity prevention, visual culture, performance studies, literary studies, music history, and decolonial theory. Some of our case studies will come from World War II, the Holocaust, and the subsequent trials, conventions, and covenants that led to contemporary practices of human rights and transitional and restorative justice, while others draw from Northern Ireland, South Africa, Vietnam, and the Hemispheric Americas, including Canada, the U.S., Chile, Argentina, and Guatemala.

Our texts will be wide ranging and may include, in whole or in part:
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia

Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?

Grace Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy and the Forgotten War

Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember

Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All

Erika Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America

Susana Draper, Afterlives of Confinement: Spatial Transitions in Postdictatorship Latin America

Jeremy Eichler, Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

Macarena Gomez-Barris, Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile

Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory

Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust  

Marianne Hirsch et al, Women Mobilizing Memory

Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

Margaret MacMillan, War: How Conflict Shaped Us

Avishai Margalits, The Ethics of Memory

Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces

Jeffrey Olick, The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility

Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead

Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory

Lauret Savoy, Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape

Daniel Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory

Marita Sturken, Tourists of History

Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire

Salamishah Tillet, Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post–Civil Rights Imagination

Kristen Weld, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala

Mechtild Widrich, Monumental Cares

James Young, The Texture of Memory

Enrollment:
Graduate students from all disciplines are welcome.