Haunted Histories: Slavery and Memory

Undergraduate / Graduate

This course draws on an eclectic range of primary sources, historical monographs, and interdisciplinary texts to examine the creative and deeply contested modes of remembering (and forgetting) chattel slavery in the United States. It begins with a brief introduction to the history of slavery before pivoting to particularly telling episodes of representation, reinterpretation, and erasure. Specific topics to be addressed include public history, dark tourism, cultural performances, early reparations movements, and popular culture. In placing these episodes into their historical contexts, we better appreciate the ways in which debates over depictions of slavery themselves illuminate the contested history of race and resistance.