Memory, Power Culture

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

AMST 204: Memory, Power, & Culture allows American Studies majors to continue their intellectual journey together, working simultaneously towards developing common vocabulary and methods, while also recording their own interests. In this course, American Studies majors sink more deeply into questions associated with American culture and corresponding problems regarding memory, diversity, identity, borderlands, nature, power, and empire. Where Origins & Identities focused on the births or constructions of narratives, this course examines how historical moments and the constructed narratives around them become ‘usable pasts’ for producers of culture. The aim is to complicate, not answer, questions tied to agency and representation. While texts and case studies are organized around prominent nineteenth-century voices and episodes that highlight anxieties over the fate of the West, (hu)man in nature, nation/empire-building, and diversity and hybridity in border spaces, this is not a nineteenth-century course. The assignments are designed to allow students to move fluidly backwards and forwards in time to interrogate the nature of memory and the fluidity and durability of cultural formation and consumption.