Race and Remembering

This course will explore struggles for power over narrating history and engages current tensions in public history and national memory. Together students will consider ongoing struggles to reckon with the violent histories of slavery, empire, colonialism, nationalism, and democracy in the US. Students will engage questions regarding remembering, forgetting, memorializing, and reckoning with histories of racial formation and violence. What are the methodological and narrative pitfalls of representing these histories? What are the possibilities for reckoning with violent histories? This course will concentrated on the Americas, but will also incorporate global understanding of legacies of narrative and memory.