Syllabus for American Studies 666: Contemporary Approaches to Cultural Memory


Robert Chester
Office: 0132 Holzapfel Hall
Office Hours: By Appointment
Email: rchester@umd.edu
Telephone: 301-577-5702



Description

This course seeks to introduce graduate students to contemporary approaches to the study of cultural memory through approaches influential in the field of American studies. The class is focused on reading and discussion, although a written final paper is required. We start by reading a number of essays that have shaped scholarship of collective memory or that offer a useful summary of trends and ideas in the field. Early in the course we also examine some theoretical approaches to the study of popular culture. We then move on to a discussion of nation-ness and transnationality, postmodernity and visuality. These early weeks will provide us with a working vocabulary and theoretical lenses that can help shape our approaches to the rest of the reading list. The bulk of the course is then given to works dealing with memory in conjunction with issues which concern American studies: race, gender, sexuality, class, postcoloniality, border studies, public history, and legal history among them. The course also draws from a number of (inter)disciplines with which American studies is in dialogue: these include history, sociology, cultural studies, ethnohistory, performance studies, ethnic studies, and literary and film criticism. I have sought to incorporate a variety of different sources: scholarly books and articles, novels, and film. The syllabus seeks to offer an international and comparative approach to American studies, placing the U.S.A. in relation to some parts of the rest of the world. We will deal with readings that touch on Japan, Korea, Guam, Puerto Rico, Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil. Non-U.S. American scholars are included also. Through the diverse scope of our (extensive) readings, we will interrogate differing forms of memory, such as inscribed memory, performed memory, oral memory, embodied memory, etc., as well as the functions memory serves and the frictions it inevitably produces.


Week 1: Hellos, Orientations, and the Shape of Memory Studies (Part I)

READINGS:
Pierre Nora, "Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Memoire," Representations 26 (Spring 1989), pp.7-24.

Barbie Zelizer, "Reading the Past Against the Grain: The Shape of Memory Studies," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12, no.2 (1995), pp.214-239.

Toni Morrison, "Memory, Creation, and Writing," in James McConkey, ed., The Anatomy of Memory (Oxford University Press, 1996), pp.212-225.







Week 2: The Shape of Memory Studies (Part II)

READINGS:
Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge University Press, 1989).

Primo Levi, "The Memory of the Offense," in The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage, 1989), pp.23-36.

Natalie Zemon Davis and Randolph Starn, "Introduction," Representations 26 (Spring 1989), pp.1-6.

Michael Omi and Howard Winant, "Racial Formation," in Racial Formation in the United States, From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp.53-76




Week 3: Nations and Transnations

READINGS:
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edition (New York: Verso, 1991).

Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, Nations Unbound: Transnational Politics, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States (New York: Gordon & Breach, 1994), chapters 1-2.

Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism," in Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), pp.43-84.

Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, "Introduction: Inventing Traditions," in Hobsbawm and Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp.1-14.



Week 4: Collective Memory and Popular Culture

READINGS:
George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).

Stuart Hall, "Notes on Deconstructing 'the Popular,'" in Raphael Samuel, ed., People's History and Socialist Theory (London: Routledge, 1981), pp.227-239.

Antonio Gramsci, "Hegemony, Intellectuals, and the State," in John Storey, ed., Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader (Harlow, Essex: Prentice Hall, 1998), pp.210-216.

Raymond Williams, "Dominant, Residual, and Emergent," in Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford University Press, 1977), pp.121-127.




Week 5: Memory, Postmodernity, Visuality

READINGS:
Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)

Jean Francois Lyotard, "The Postmodern Condition," in Jeffrey C. Alexander and Steven Seidman, eds., Culture and Society: Contemporary Debates (Cambridge UP, 1990), pp.330-341.

Michael Paul Rogin, "Ronald Reagan, the Movie," in Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie and Other Episodes in American Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp.1-43.

Emily S. Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), pp.99-189.

FILM: Michael Bay, Dir., Pearl Harbor (2001).

Week 6: Remembering Internment

READINGS:
John Okada, No-No Boy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976 [1957]).

Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), Chapters 1-4.

Marita Sturken, "Absent Images of Memory: Remembering and Reenacting the Japanese Internment," in T. Fujitani et.al., Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s) (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), pp.33-49.

John Streamas, "'Patriotic Drunk': To be Yellow, Brave, and Disappeared in Bad Day at Black Rock," American Studies, 44:1-2 (Spring/Summer 2003), pp.99-119

FILM: Rea Tajiri, Dir. History and Memory (1991).

Week 7: Landscapes of Remembering: Monuments and Memorials

READINGS:
Edward T. Linenthal, The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory (Oxford University Press, 2001).

Kenneth E. Foote, Shadowed Ground: America's Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), pp.1-35.

James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1993), pp.vi-xiii, 1-15.






Week 8: Remembering Slavery (Part I)

READING:
David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001).

Jon Ronson, "The Klansman Who Won't Use the N-Word," in Ronson, Them: Adventures With Extremists (London: Picador, 2001), pp.174-201.




Week 9: Remembering Slavery (Part II)

READINGS:
Frances E. W. Harper, Iola Leroy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987 [1893]).

Carla L. Peterson, "Commemorative Ceremonies and Invented Traditions: History, Memory, and Modernity in the 'New Negro' Novel of the Nadir (1892-1903)" (unpublished draft, 2003).

Victoria E. Bynum, "Misshapen Identity: Memory, Folklore, and the Legend of Rachel Knight," in Martha Hodes, ed., Sex, Love, Race (NYU Press, 1999), pp.237-253.

Johnita Scott-Obadele, "The Modern Struggle for Reparations," in Herb Boyd, ed., Race and Resistance: African Americans in the 21st Century (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2002), pp.143-152.






Week 10: Embodied Memories: Performance and Remembering in The Americas

READINGS:
Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

T.J. Deschi Obi, "Combat and Crossing the Kalunga," in Linda Heywood, ed., Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora (Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp.353-372.

Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (Oxford University Press, 1989), Intro and Chapters 1-2.








Week 11: Memory and Orality: Native Peoples in the Americas

READINGS:
Andrea Laforet, with Annie York, Spuzzum: Fraser Canyon Histories, 1808-1939 (Ottawa: University of British Columbia Press, 1998).

James Clifford, "Identity in Mashpee," in Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Harvard University Press, 1988), pp.277-346.

Vine Deloria, Jr., "Science and the Oral Tradition," in Deloria, Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1997), pp.23-46.








Week 12: Public History and Culture Wars

READINGS:
Edward T. Linenthal, "Anatomy of a Crisis," pp.9-62

Paul Boyer, "Whose History is it Anyway? Memory, Politics, and Historical Scholarship," pp.115-139; both in Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, eds., History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1996).

Lisa Yoneyama, "For Transformative Knowledge and Postnationalist Public Spheres: The Smithsonian Enola Gay Controversy," in Fujitani et. al., eds., Perilous Memories, pp.323-346

Mike Wallace, "Mickey Mouse History: Portraying the Past at Disney World," pp.33-57.

Roy Rosenzweig, "Marketing the Past: American Heritage and Popular History in the United States, 1954-1984," pp.7-29; both in Radical History Review 32 (1985).

Daryle Williams, Culture Wars in Brazil: The First Vargas Regime, 1930-1945 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), Introduction and Chapters 5-6.



Week 13: Memory, Postcoloniality, and Narrative

READINGS:
Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt, "On the Borders Between U.S. Studies and Postcolonial Theory," pp.3-69

Jana Sequoya Magdaleno, "How (!) Is an Indian? A Contest of Stories, Round 2," pp.279-299.

Rhonda Cobham, "Revisioning Our Kumblas: Transforming Feminist and Nationalist Agendas in Three Carribean Women's Texts," pp.300-319.

Juan Flores, "Broken English Memories: Languages of the Trans-Colony," pp.338-348.

Leny Mendoza Strobel, "'Born Again Filipino': Filipino American Identity and Asian Panethnicity," pp.349-369; all in Singh and Schmidt, eds., Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000).


Week 14: Memory, Postcoloniality, and War

READINGS:
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington, (New York: Grove Press, 1963), especially pp.166-189, and 207-248.

Lamont Lindstrom, "Images of Islanders in Pacific War Photographs," pp.107-128.

Vicente M. Diaz, "Deliberating 'Liberation Day': Identity, History, Memory, and War in Guam," pp.155-180.

Utsumi Aiko, "Korean 'Imperial Soldiers': Remembering Colonialism and Crimes Against Allied POWs," pp.199-217.

Toyonaga Keisaburo, "Colonialism and Atom Bombs: About Survivors of Hiroshima Living in Korea," pp.395-410; all in Fujitani et.al., eds., Perilous Memories.









Week 15: Haunting

READINGS: Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

Paul West, "The Girls and Ghouls of Memory," in McConkey, ed., The Anatomy of Memory, pp.355-365.










Week 16: Memory and Murder

READING: Beth Loffreda, Losing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

Neil Gotanda, "Tales of Two Judges: Joyce Karlin in People v. Soon Ja Du; Lance Ito in People v. O.J. Simpson," in Wahneema Lubiano, ed., The House That Race Built (New York: Vintage Books, 1998): 66-86.

FILM: Moises Kaufman, Dir., The Laramie Project (2001).








Course Requirements
Most importantly, students will keep up with each week's reading assignments and participate in discussion every class period. Each of us is required to take responsibility for framing class discussion on one occasion, offering questions and highlighting additional material of interest to the class. Each week, one student will be responsible for providing a supplementary bibliography of some literature pertinent to that week's texts. Students will also present a five-to-ten minute statement on the ways in which they feel collective memory and tradition have shaped and continue to shape their own identities and communities. The major project of the semester is a journal-length article (or an equivalent project in another form, such as film) on any aspect of cultural memory relevant to American studies. Students are encouraged to pursue their own interests and use their imaginations here.

Reading and Seminar Discussion
It is essential to the effective functioning of the class that everyone do their utmost to complete each reading assignment and spend a little time considering what they have read before coming to class each week. I appreciate that this can be difficult due to the pressures of time, but if the seminar is to be productive for all of us, it will be because we are all prepared and engaged. By its nature, American studies raises sensitive issues that can sometimes provoke heated disagreements. As important as each of our contributions is the understanding that we must seek to remain respectful towards one another at all times. That said, this is an academic seminar and is therefore an open forum for ideas to be raised, debated, and analysed for strengths and weaknesses.

Leading Discussion
Everyone will lead discussion once during the semester. The discussion leader is required to provide a brief assessment of the major issues raised by the readings, and to offer questions that enable the class to discuss the merits and shortcomings of the texts. The presentation should be in the form of a handout, and should not simply seek to restate the readings. This is an important task, as the shape of our discussion will be guided by the presenter's questions and analytical approaches. If the discussion leader wishes to do more than a handout, or if she simply wishes to discuss the readings before composing the handout, she is welcome to discuss this with the instructor.

Supplementary Bibliography Assignment
Again on a once each basis, each week one student will be required to compile an annotated bibliography of 5-10 texts complementary to that week's assigned readings. Students should obviously not feel obligated to read ten books, but should seek instead to provide a brief summary paragraph alongside each of their choices, explaining the major arguments and connecting the supplementary texts to the theme for that week. Again this should be handed out to the class. Over the course of the semester we will be producing a valuable bibliographic resource of use to each of us.

Personal Statement
This assignment is intended to provoke reflection on the ways that collective memories and cultural traditions shape our own lives, as well as a way to introduce ourselves to one another in a little detail. Again, this assignment will be a once only deal. You are asked to compose statement of between five and ten minutes reflecting on the ways that cultural memory has shaped your own subjectivity and that of the communities with which you identify. This, I think, will be a useful intellectual exercise through which to think about our scholarship and politics, as well as the ways that memory shapes and is shaped by the everyday. Remember, you aren't being asked to justify your existence, nor to say any more than you choose about your life.

Seminar Paper
This assignment is almost entirely left to the individual student. The only restriction is that the essay (or, as mentioned above, an alternative project such as a film) deal with a subject related to cultural memory and American studies. Students are encouraged to start thinking about this early in the semester, and to consult with the instructor should they wish. The paper should obviously follow the conventions of formal academic writing.

Grading
Unfortunately, grades do not disappear at this level. The percentages of your grade for each assignment are as follows:

Class Participation: 30%
Leading Discussion: 15%
Supplementary Bibliography: 15%
Final Essay: 40%
The personal statement is, of course, not graded.

Required Texts
Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember, 1989.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 2nd edition, 1991.
George Lipsitz, Time Passages, 1990.
Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories, 1997.
John Okada, No-No Boy, 1957.
Edward T. Linenthal, The Unfinished Bombing, 2001.
David W. Blight, Race and Reunion, 2001.
Frances Harper, Iola Leroy, 1893.
Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 2003.
Andrea Laforet, Spuzzum, 1998.
Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 1997.
Beth Loffreda, Losing Matt Shepard, 2000.
T. Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama, eds., Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s), 2001.

Integrity and Special Needs
Plagiarism or any other kind of cheating is obviously not permitted. Students who violate the University's Code of Academic Integrity receive an XF grade. A fuller description of this is available Here. Details about the University's Honor Pledge - "I pledge on my honor that I have not given or received any unauthorized assistance on this assignment/examination" - are available through the university's web site. If you have any special needs, such as learning disabilities, accomodations regarding access to classrooms, or anything else, please inform the instructor quickly so that we can make arrangements.

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