How We Remember: Collective Memories of Slavery and Colonialism in Contemporary Nonfiction Cinema

This course is organized in two parts; in the first, we examine five ethnographic and documentary films seeking to comprehend the significance of visual reconstructions of different colonial periods and legacies. We critically analyze bias and injustice in visual historical reconstructions instead of letting them go unaddressed. In the second part of the course, we focus on education and focus on the use of films in class. We study and compare digital learning companions that are complementary to some of the assigned films. As a final project, we use the digital platform Skalar to create a website collecting materials from course assignments. During the semester, we have three guest lectures by directors and education specialists who have used films and digital tools to teach the core topics of this course.