Conceptualize your own monument, memorial, or
museum which shines a light on a ‘forgotten moment’ of either local or global history. You will want to focus on the following questions: Why is a memorial, monument, or museum needed to commemorate this given 4 event or historical actor? What objects, things or people does your
monument need to include in order to adequately commemorate and/or
memorialize a given event, person, or historical epoch? How does your
‘site of memory’ address the tension between individual and collective
memory? You will pitch your project idea to your class colleagues and
they will rigorously examine your proposal. (Feel free to use the city of
Boston as a ‘living archive’. For instance, you might think about Boston’s
own history of racial violence, segregation, and gentrification. This
example is merely suggestive, and you are free to move in whichever
intellectual direction you may choose.)
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Course Readings::
Trauma, Memory
Week 2: Sites of Contested Memory: Slavery, American History, and Monuments to the Confederacy
Readings
Lois E. Horton, “Avoiding History: Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the Uncomfortable Public Conversation on Slavery,” in Horton & Horton, eds.,
Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory (North
Carolina: The New Press, 2006).
Sam Levin, “Lynching Memorial Leaves Some Quietly Seething—‘Let Sleeping Dogs
Lie’, The Guardian (April 28, 2018).
Scott Jaschik, “Race, History, and Robert E. Lee,” Inside Higher Education (May 29,
2018).
Week 3: The Disaster of European Settler Colonialism & the Origins of European Genocide
Readings
Antoinette Burton, An ABC of Queen Victoria’s Empire, Or a Primer of Conquest,
Dissent, and Disruption (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).
Sven Lindqvist, ‘Exterminate All the Brutes’: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of
Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide (New York: The New Press,
1996).
Kehinde Andrews, “Colonial Nostalgia is Back in Fashion, Blinding Us to the Horrors of
Empire,” The Guardian (August 24, 2016). *weblink provided on Moodle
Week 4: Post-Colonial Theory, Memory, and Genocide:
Readings
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963).
Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the
Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
Week 5: Is Colonialism Over? ‘Manifest Destiny,’ Memory, and the Gentrification
of American Cities
Readings
Paige Glotzer, “The Connections Between Urban Development and Colonialism,” Black
Perspectives (November 27, 2017).
Lacino Hamilton, “The Gentrification-to-Prison Pipeline,” Truth-Out (April 30, 2017).
Zebulon Miletsky and Tomas Gonzalez, “How Gentrification and Displacement Are
Remaking Boston,” Black Perspectives (November 27, 2017).
In-class film screening: Good White People: A Short Film About Gentrification
Week 6: The Catastrophe of the Holocaust and the Limits of Memory:
Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (New York: Penguin
Books, 1967).
Tony Judt, “From the House of the Dead: An Essay on Modern European Memory,” in
Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Books,
2006).
Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (New York: Touchstone, 1996).
Primo Levi, “Letters from Germans,” in Levi, ed., The Drowned and the Saved (New
York: Vintage International, 1988).
Week 7: 9/11 and the Forgotten Victims of America’s War on Terrorism
Dave Eggers, Zeitoun (New York: Vintage Books, 2009).
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2007).
George Packer, “The Broken Contract: Inequality and American Decline,” Foreign
Affairs, vol. 90, no. 6 (Nov/Dec 2011): 20-31.
Week 8: American Mass Shootings and the Columbine Myth
Readings
Dave Cullen, Columbine (New York: Twelve Books, 2009).
Isabelle Robinson, “I Tried to Befriend Nikolas Cruz. He Still Killed My Friends,” The
New York Times (March 27, 2018).
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