Critical and Reflective Inquiry: Theme - Critical Memory Studies

Remembering Against Oblivion and Erasure: Critical Memory Studies

“I got to thinking about the moral meaning of memory, per se. And what it means to forget, what it means to fail to find and preserve the connection with the dead whose lives you, or I, want or need to honor with our own.”—June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die

Tragically close to her own premature death, the great poet and freedom fighter June Jordan meditated upon the political meaning of memory. Throughout her tireless life, Jordan consistently worked within community against the erasure of the lives, memories, and dreams of communities seized and sacrificed by the brutal and quotidian blunt of state violence. In this pursuit, Jordan was not alone; she consistently learned from, and joined with, a chorus of philosophers, activists, writers, artists, and movements that point to the political imperative to remember, especially in the face of erasure.

This class brings together discussions on memory from multiple geographical, historical, and cultural identities, and vantage points. Here, I refer to memory neither as the unmediated retrieval of neutral information nor as a means to create an objective history. Rather, as Jordan suggests above, memory is both alive and required to live fully. We can thus understand “the labors of memory” as a collective political act of wrestling with the often-painful past and ongoing injustice in order to emerge as active social agents in the present (Jelin 2003).

Rooted in a multiplicity of literatures, this class will interrogate the concept of collective political memory in the face of erasure. We ask what it means to remember against the dominant tide of history. Where does memory reside? What does it mean to insist upon memory in the face of cultural oblivion? How have different communities resisted political amnesia in the face of both dramatic historical events and business as usual? And what are the consequences of failing to do so?  Throughout the course, students will be provided with tools to engage with their own ancestral memory projects and archives, which will form the basis of the final research project.