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Cities of Contested Memory MIT DUSP 11.S939

Fall 2018 | Tuesdays 2-5pm

Class location: 3-329

Instructor: Delia Wendel

Email: wendel@mit.edu

Office: 9-521

Office hours: Mondays 2-4pm, sign up for a time at http://dusp.mit.edu/officehours

for other times email for an appointment

Course website: https://learning-modules.mit.edu/class/index.html?uuid=/course/11/fa18/11.S939#info

Course Description

This seminar explores relationships between built environments and memory. Memory is both a

faculty for dealing with previous experiences and a social, economic, and political force that

shapes the legacy of the past. Within the vast field of memory studies, this course will highlight

the study of spaces and spatial practices in which the future of the past is imagined, negotiated,

and contested. In particular, it will emphasize three areas of critical importance to understanding

the nature of memory in cities today: 1) the threats that rapid urban development pose to the

remembrance of urban pasts; 2) the politics of representation evident in debates over authorized

and marginalized historical narratives; and 3) the art and ethics of sensitively addressing the

afterlives of violence and tragedy.

Classes will draw intensively from readings in theory and about places and people. Theoretical

texts will include those by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Maurice Halbwachs, Alison Landsberg,

Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Pierre Nora, among others. We will consider these authors’ conceptual

frameworks in relation to contexts close to home, including the controversies surrounding civil

war monuments in places like Charlottesville; the commemoration of 9/11 at the World Trade

Center site in New York City; and the production of Holocaust memorials in cities at a distance

from sites of violence (e.g. Boston). Our concerns will also take us to Latin America, where we

will learn about the relationships between erasure, materiality, and justice evident in “truth

museums”; to Rwanda to explore the emotional, organizational, and physical labor involved in

producing memorials to the genocide; and to Chernobyl, where we will consider the afterlives

(and half-lives) of catastrophic accidents that have produced long-term bodily and environmental

effects that challenge us to reconsider the nature of memory.

Course Expectations and Grading

This is a course that will require the active participation of every individual—in completing all

readings, preparing questions and comments for each class, and debating issues with respect and

openness. In addition, each participant will be required to develop a final project—using primary

sources—that will take the form of either a research paper or design proposal. Through our group

discussions and individual projects, it will be our collective task to critically probe the ways that

communities choose to remember (and spatialize) the past.

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Class Discussion: 20%

This course is a reading, writing, and discussion seminar. It requires the active and

sustained participation of every individual. Each week, a small group of students will

lead a discussion of the assigned texts. Every seminar participant will be asked to lead

one class discussion.

For student discussion leaders: your job is to identify what you think are the 2 most

interesting issues raised in the texts studied that week. You do not need to discuss every

detail of every text. Rather, you might: reflect on the session’s topic and identify issues or

concepts that you can trace across two or more texts. OR: describe an author’s theoretical

contribution(s), explore what you find helpful about her theoretical framework, and

consider some of its limitations. OR: focus on a single passage in a text—summarize

what you think the passage contributes to the session topic, focusing on what you think

the author is trying to say, what we know about her, and how that might shape our

understanding of her text. In all cases: you will be responsible for posing open-ended

discussion questions for your colleagues to facilitate our collective exploration of the 2

issues that you identify.

For those not leading the discussion: your job is to do the assigned readings and be

willing to talk. You may find some of the material challenging to understand—there will

be others who feel similarly! Please ask questions of concepts, passages, chapters, or

theories to aid our comprehension. You may not fully understand or agree with a concept

or theory, but you are obliged to try to make sense of them.

Weekly Response Papers: 30%

Every week, participants are required to write and submit a short essay of between 1-2

pages that are exercises in reflection on the subject and reading material assigned for the

week. The purpose of the Response Papers is to develop your own archive of weekly

reflections and to help prepare your contributions to class discussions. Response Papers

should elaborate, in concise and critical prose, at least two questions or analytic

comments that you have in relationship to the assigned readings. Provide evidence from

the texts (using consistent citation practices—author last name, year, and page number

will suffice) to support your views and interpretations.

Response Papers are due by the start of each class (to be submitted via the course

website). Length and format: 1-2 pages single-spaced, 12 pt Times Roman, PDF. Bring

copies to class to help you formulate questions and comments in our class discussions.

Students who are leading discussion do not need to submit a response paper that week.

Final Project: 50%

The Final Project may either be a research paper or a design proposal on a topic related to

memory and the built environment. One way to orient your projects: choose to research

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or design for a counter or collective memory. You may draw inspiration from or extend

one of the topics we cover in class (see Course Summary, next page) or develop one of

your own obsessions. In both research paper and design proposal format the Final Project

must draw from primary sources in addition to secondary literature.

Primary sources of information are those that provide first-hand accounts of the events,

practices, places, or conditions that you are researching. They can be historical or

contemporary. Some examples of primary sources include: interviews with Boston

residents last week, photographs of Cambridge from the 19th

century, creative works,

financial records, diaries, letters, newspaper articles, and oral histories (to name a few).

Note that spatial data can be considered a primary source—the key here is that whether

you collect it or someone else does, that it be available to you in some pre-analysis form.

Please do not consider primary sources as unassailable truths by default. Like all sources,

they must be contextualized, verified, and taken to be representative of some (but not a

full) window on experience.

If you are developing a design proposal for a place of memory, you must include a 1,500

word project rationale that elaborates on the theoretical and contextual basis for your

design. The design proposal must also include a series of visual representations to

adequately describe your project.

If you are developing a research paper, plan to write around 5,000 words. Choose a topic

that can be framed as a problematic—as an inquiry that can be followed through both a

selection of the theoretical literature and primary sources. You may choose to develop a

topic that is historical or contemporary.

In preparation for your Final Project, plan to meet with Dr. Wendel to discuss research

ideas in the first weeks of class and develop a research prospectus that you will share

with peers for constructive feedback.

You may absolutely work in teams. If you choose to do so, it is imperative that you meet

with Dr. Wendel both on your own and as a group and that you have discrete

contributions to the final project.

Final Project Deadlines:

Oct 15: Plan to meet with Dr. Wendel during office hours before this date to

discuss your final project ideas

Oct 26, 5pm: Upload a research prospectus to the course website. The prospectus

should include 500 words to identify your research question(s) and describe the

context that you will explore. In addition, list the primary source material you will

draw from and at least 5 key secondary sources (e.g. literature on your topic). You

will exchange your prospectus with a colleague in class to refine your ideas.

Dec 12 (TBC): Final project due date (upload to course website)

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General class guidelines:

No one is required to agree with one another, but everyone should try to understand

others’ points of view. Please consider this class an opportunity to be open and

empathetic, to disagree with respect, and to think constructively about difficult topics.

Late assignments will not be accepted. These and missed classes will result in the

reduction of your grade. Excused absences will be considered with advance notice.

Course Summary of Session Topics and Assignment Deadlines

Session Date Session Topic Assignment Due

Sep 04 No Class—Registration Day None

01 Sep 11 Cities, Memory, and History RP 01

02 Sep 18 The Invention of Tradition RP 02

03 Sep 25 Collective and Prosthetic Memory RP 03

04 Oct 02 Power, Representation, and Counter Memory RP 04

Oct 09 No Class—Columbus Day By Oct 15: Research Ideas mtg. w/ DW

05 Oct 16 Places of Memory RP 05

06 Oct 23 Race and Monuments in American Cities RP 06

Oct 26, 5pm: Research Prospectus due

07 Oct 30 Proposal Peer Review + Library Visit

08 Nov 06 The Holocaust Memory Paradigm RP 07

09 Nov 13 The Art of Just Memory RP 08

10 Nov 20 Museums of Truth RP 09

11 Nov 27 An Era of Heritage RP 10

12 Dec 04 The Ruins of War RP 11

13 Dec 11 Environmental Afterlives RP 12

Dec 12 TBC: Final Project due

*RP: Response Paper; all response papers are due before class; upload a PDF to the course

website.

* : Indicates a deadline related to the Final Project

NOTE: syllabus is subject to change. Changes will be announced in advance.

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Readings and Discussion Topics by Session

Sep 11 | Cities, Memory, and History

Many view our present situation as a crisis of memory: where the material trace of the past (the

memory-space of a community) is threatened by rapid, generic, urban development. We will

discuss the various historical permutations of this claim along with scholarly distinctions

between memory and history. Singapore and New York City will provide context for our

discussions (note: we will be meeting on the anniversary of 9/11).

Required reading:

Paul Ricoeur, “Excerpts from Memory—History—Forgetting (2004),” in J. Olick et. al. eds.

The Collective Memory Reader (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2011): 475-480.

Anthony Vidler, “Posturbanism,” in The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern

Unhomely (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992): 177-186.

CHOOSE ONE TO SKIM and ONE TO READ CAREFULLY:

John Phillips, “The Future of the Past: Archiving Singapore,” in M. Crinson, ed., Urban

Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City (New York: Routledge, 2005): 145-168.

Lynne B. Sagalyn, “Chapter 5: “It’s Our City”,” Power at Ground Zero: Politics, Money,

and the Remaking of Lower Manhattan (New York: Oxford U. Press, 2016):133-166.

Additional resources:

Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (New York: Verso, 2009).

M. Christine Boyer, The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural

Entertainments (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).

Mark Crinson, ed., Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City (New York:

Routledge, 2005).

Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford:

Stanford U. Press, 2003).

Kerwin Lee Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” Representations 69

(2000): 127-150.

Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, “The Generic City,” S, M, L, XL (Rotterdam: Hans Werlemann,

1995): 1238-1267.

Charles S. Maier, “A Surfeit of Memory? Reflections on History, Melancholy, and Denial,

History and Memory 5, 2 (1993): 136-152.

Sep 18 | The Invention of Tradition

Memory is not merely a faculty for registering prior experiences; it is also a source of national

and political identity and a force for marketing the past (whether for cultural means or economic

gains). We will read the introduction to the canonic Hobsbawm and Ranger book, The Invention

of Tradition, to explore theses on the instrumentalization of history. We consider this text along

with the urban heritage industry and the legacies of invented traditions (their ruins and

transformations) in Monrovia, Liberia.

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Required reading:

Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions” The Invention of Tradition

(Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1983): 1-14.

Danny Hoffman, “Chapter 3: E.J. Roye The Corporate (Post)Modern,” and “Chapter 4: Hotel

Africa The Uncritical Ruin,” Monrovia Modern: Urban Form and the Political Imagination

in Liberia (Durham: Duke U. Press, 2017): 91-142 [quick read, part photographic essay].

David Lowenthal, “Introduction” and “Chapter 10: Rivalry and Restitution,” The Heritage

Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1997): xiii-xvii, 227-

250.

Additional resources:

Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001).

Okwui Enwezor, “Modernity and Postcolonial Ambivalences,” South Atlantic Quarterly 109, 3

(2010): 595-620.

David C. Harvey, “Heritage Pasts and Heritage Presents: Temporality, Meaning and the Scope of

Heritage Studies,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 7, 4 (2001): 319-338.

Julia Hell and Andreas Schonle, eds., Ruins of Modernity (Durham: Duke U. Press, 2010).

Terence Ranger, “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa,” in Hobsbawm and Ranger, eds.

(Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1983): 211-262.

Edward Said, “Invention, Memory, and Place,” Critical Inquiry 26 (2000): 175-192.

Georg Simmel, “The Ruin” The Hudson Review 11, 3 ([1911] 1958): 379-385.

Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage (London: Routledge, 2006).

Sep 25 | Collective and Prosthetic Memory

What is collective memory and its relationship to place? What communities are formed from

collective memories and vice versa? How might a concept like “prosthetic memory” extend our

understanding of the ways in which collective memories form and operate today?

Required reading:

Maurice Halbwachs, excerpts from “Chapters 1, 2, and 4” The Collective Memory (New

York: Harper-Colophon, [1925] 1980): 44-49, 78-82, 128-141 [20 pages].

Alison Landsberg, “Prosthetic Memory: The Ethics and Politics of Memory in an Age of

Mass Culture,” Memory and Popular Film, Paul Grainge, ed. (Manchester: Manchester U.

Press, 2003): 144-158.

Michael Rothberg and Yasemin Yildiz, “Memory Citizenship: Migrant Archives of

Holocaust Remembrance in Contemporary Germany,” Parallax 17, 4 (2011): 32-48.

Additional resources:

Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, Cambridge U. Press, 1989).

Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the

Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia U. Press, 2004).

Jeffrey Olick et al. eds., The Collective Memory Reader (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2011).

Michael Schudson, Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and

Reconstruct the Past (New York: Basic Books, 1992).

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Sudhir Venkatesh, American Project: The Rise and Fall of an American Ghetto (Cambridge:

Harvard U. Press, 2000).

Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National

Tradition (Chicago: Chicago U. Press, 1995).

Oct 02 | Power, Representation, and Counter Memory

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, writer Milan Kundera posits that “the struggle of man

against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” In this session we will explore

Foucault’s concept of “counter memory” and the forms and practices of representation that aim

to make such marginalized or oppositional experiences visible in a public sphere. We will also

consider the processes and power structures that authenticate and govern collective memory. Los

Angeles and Dolores Hayden’s landmark text, The Power of Place, will help focus our

discussions.

Required reading:

Dolores Hayden, “Preface, Ch-01 Contested Terrain, Ch-04 Invisible Angelenos, Ch-10

Storytelling with the Shapes of Time,” The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public

History (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995): x-xvii, 2-13, 82-97, 226-239.

George Lipsitz, “Ch-09 History, Myth, and Counter-Memory: Narrative and Desire in

Popular Novels,” Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture

(Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 1990): 211-232.

Additional resources:

Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1995).

Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice

(Ithaca: Cornell U. Press, 1977): 139-164.

Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: U. of

Minnesota Press, 1997).

[Examples of public history interventions—see other chapters]: Dolores Hayden, The Power of

Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995).

Michel Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon

Press Books, 1995).

Oct 09 | Columbus Day—NO CLASS

There are no assigned readings for this week. But to keep the momentum going, you might

consider reading the short fiction essay by Milan Kundera, “The Angels,” in The Book of

Laughter and Forgetting (see course website for PDF).

Strongly recommend: that you use this week to develop your Research Proposals, due in two

weeks.

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Oct 16 | Places of Memory

How do places register and activate memory? Furthermore, how do we understand the city as a

medium of memory? Are cities historical texts to be read, interpreted, and translated? Are urban

environments palimpsests, haunted sites, or merely temporary materializations of global flows?

What, moreover, is the status of the city as a historical source in relationship to archives, natural

environments, or landfills for that matter? We will ground our discussions in Berlin and Cape

Town.

Required Reading:

Annie E. Coombes, “District 6: The Archaeology of Memory,” History after Apartheid:

Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Durham: Duke U. Press,

2003):116-148.

Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux des Mémoire,” Representations 26

(1989): 7-24.

Karen E. Till, “Chapter 01: Hauntings, Memory, Place,” The New Berlin: Memory, Politics,

Place (Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 2005): 5-24.

Additional resources:

Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. by N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer (New York: Zone

Books, [1896] 1991).

Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).

Paul Connerton, “Two Types of Place Memory,” How Modernity Forgets (Cambridge:

Cambridge U. Press, 2009): 7-39.

Adrian Forty and Susanne Kuchler, eds., The Art of Forgetting (Oxford: Berg, 1999).

Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory,” Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, R.

Baker et al., eds. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998): 183-200.

Pierre Nora, ed., Rethinking France: Les Lieux de Mémoire Vol. 2, trans. by D.P. Jordan

(Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 2006).

Raymond Williams, “Structures of Feeling,” Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford U. Press:

1977): 128-135.

Oct 23 | Race and Monuments in American Cities

Public spaces in the United States are sites of contestation. This has been ever more apparent in

recent years’ debates regarding memorials to slavery and monuments to the confederate and civil

rights eras. Historically, these discussions have been proxies for those on race, citizenship, and

civic values. In this session, we begin to untangle the power structures, myths, erasures, and

representation of race in American cities by studying historical contexts and current debates

around urban monuments. Part of our class conversation will center on Charlottesville.

Required reading:

Garnette Cardogan, “[placeholder]” forthcoming New York Review of Books [TBC]

Brent Leggs, “Growth of Historic Sites: Teaching Public Historians to Advance Preservation

Practice,” The Public Historian 40, 3 (2018): 90-106.

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Kirk Savage, “The Politics of Memory: Black Emancipation and the Civil War Monument,”

Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, J.R. Gillis, ed. (Princeton: Princeton U.

Press, 1994): 127-149.

Dell Upton, “Confederate Monuments and Civic Values in the Wake of Charlottesville,”

Blog of the Society of Architectural Historians, 13 Sept 2017, online:

https://www.sah.org/publications-and-research/sah-blog/sah-blog/2017/09/13/confederate-

monuments-and-civic-values-in-the-wake-of-charlottesville

Additional resources:

Craig E. Barton, ed., Sites of Memory: Perspectives on Architecture and Race (Princeton:

Princeton Architectural Press, 2001).

John E. Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the

Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1992).

Walter J. Hood and Megan Basnak, “Diverse Truths: Unveiling the Hidden Layers of the

Shadow Catcher Commemoration,” Diversity and Design: Understanding Hidden

Consequences, B. Tauke et al, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2015): xx.

George Lipsitz, “The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race: Theorizing the

Hidden Architecture of Landscape,” Landscape Journal 26, 1 (2007): 10-23.

Salamishah Tillet, Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Radical Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights

Imagination (Durham: Duke U. Press, 2012).

Dell Upton, What Can and Can’t Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the

Contemporary South (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 2015).

Oct 30 | Proposal Peer Review & Library Visit

This session will be structured in two parts: a visit to the MIT Libraries for an introduction to

some of the Institute’s primary source holdings and special collections. The second part of the

session will be devoted to group work: peer review and consultation around your Research

Proposals.

Note: Research Proposals are due online by Oct 26th

at 5pm to give your colleagues time to read.

Required reading:

Susan Gillman, “Remembering Slavery, Again,” Caribbean Quarterly 61, 4 (2015): 1-19.

Environmental historian Bill Cronon has compiled an excellent primer on “doing” historical

research with primary sources: http://www.williamcronon.net/researching/documents.htm

Additional resources:

Craig Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities

(New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013)

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Nov 06 | The Holocaust Memory Paradigm

In this session, we examine the influence of Holocaust memory organizations and

memorialization practices on our understanding and representation of other difficult pasts. Doing

so allows us to engage in debates regarding the exceptionality of Holocaust memory curation and

its simultaneously paradigmatic status as a global form of commemoration.

Required reading:

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, “Working Through the Past: Some Thoughts on Forgiveness in

Cultural Context,” Memory, Narrative, and Forgiveness: Perspectives on the Unfinished

Journeys of the Past, P. Gobodo-Madikizela and C. Van Der Merwe, eds. (Newcastle Upon

Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009): 148-169.

Alison Landsberg, “America, The Holocaust, and the Mass Culture of Memory: The ‘Object’

of Remembering,” Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in

the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia U. Press, 2004): 111-139.

Michael Rothberg, “Introduction: Theorizing Multidirectional Memory in a Transnational

Age,” Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization

(Stanford: Stanford U. Press, 2009): 1-29.

Additional resources:

Aleida Assmann, “The Holocaust—A Global Memory? Extensions and Limits of a Memory

Community,” Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices, and Trajectories, A.

Assmann and S. Conrad, eds. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010): 97-118.

[on the concepts of “post-memory” and “transferential space”] Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer,

Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (Berkeley: U. of

California Press, 2010).

Noah Shenker, “Through the Lens of the Shoah: The Holocaust as a Paradigm for Documenting

Genocide Testimonies,” History & Memory 28, 1 (2016): 141-175.

[see Chapter 12 for analysis of Boston’s Holocaust Memorial] James E. Young, The Texture of

Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1993).

Nov 13 | The Art of Just Memory

Viet Thanh Nguyen sagely remarks that “all wars are fought twice, the first time on the

battlefield, the second time in memory.” On his view, the nature and representation of memories

are intimately entangled with the afterlives of violent conflict. Nguyen’s recent book provides a

foundation for our discussion on global conflict heritage—on the material and psychosocial

legacies of violence and war—and the ethics of inclusive representation. We will return to

different aspects of conflict heritage during the next few sessions.

Required reading:

[**Please plan to purchase the book**] Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and

the Memory of War (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 2016).

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Additional resources:

Georges Didi-Huberman, Images In Spite of All: Four Photographs of Auschwitz (Chicago: U. of

Chicago Press, 2008).

Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, Human Rights and Memory (University Park: Pennsylania

State University Press, 2010).

Jorge Otero-Pailos, “Experimental Preservation” Places Journal (2016): online

https://placesjournal.org/article/experimental-preservation/

Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (New York: Random House, [1966] 2014).

Nov 20 | Museums of Truth

In the aftermath of violent dictatorships in Latin America, civil society groups and national

governments embraced museological practices in pursuit of truth and justice. Such institutional

and material forms of memory were considered to be central to making visible (state) violence

that was previously hidden. In this session, we look at the relationship between visibility and

truth-telling in the form of forensic and museological practices—along with strategies of silence

and invisibility.

Required reading:

Amy Sodaro, “Introduction,” and “The Museum of Memory and Human Rights: ‘A Living

Museum for Chile’s Memory’,” Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of

Past Violence (Newark: Rutgers U. Press, 2017): 1-11, 111-137.

Kimberly Theidon, “The Milk of Sorrow: A Theory on the Violence of Memory,” Canadian

Woman Studies 27, 1 (2009):8-16.

Eyal Weizman, “Introduction: Forensis,” Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth (New

York: Sternberg Press, 2014): 9-32.

Additional resources:

Annie E. Coombes, History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic

South Africa (Durham: Duke U. Press, 2003).

Zoe Crossland, “Violent Spaces: Conflict over the Reappearance of Argentina’s Disappeared,”

Materiel Culture: The Archaeology of 20th

Century Conflict, C. M. Beck et al. eds., (New

York: Routledge, 2002): 115-131.

Andreas Huyssen, “Memory Sites in an Expanded Field: Memory Sites in Buenos Aires,”

Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford U.

Press, 2003): 94-109.

Adrian Parr, Deleuze and Memorial Culture: Desire, Singular Memory, and the Politics of

Trauma (Edinburgh: U. of Edinburgh Press, 2008).

Francisco Ferramdiz and Antonius C.G.M. Robben, eds. Necropolitics: Mass Graves and

Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights (Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

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Nov 27 | An Era of Heritage

In Rwanda after the 1994 genocide, there are stark distinctions between collective and counter

memory—or, national and lived memory—with the former rendered overwhelmingly visible and

the latter barely articulated in public. This session will explore the memory work that

transformed counter memory to collective memory and other experiences marginalized by the

dominance of the national narrative. These various forms of memory work are comprised of

fundamentally spatial practices, constituting what I call an “era of heritage”.

Required reading:

Jennie Burnet, “Chapter 2, Remembering the Genocide: Lived Memory and National

Mourning,” Genocide Lives in Us: Women, Memory, and Silence in Rwanda (Madison: U. of

Wisconsin Press, 2012): 74-109.

Delia Wendel, chapters from Rwanda’s Genocide Heritage: Between Memory and

Sovereignty (forthcoming).

Additional resources:

Erin Jessee, Negotiating Genocide in Rwanda: The Politics of History (New York: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2017).

Timothy Longman, Memory and Justice in Post-Genocide Rwanda (New York: Cambridge U.

Press, 2017).

Jens Meierhenrich and Martha Lagace, “Photo Essay: Tropes of Memory,” Humanity: An

International Journal of Human Rights 4, 2 (2013): 289-312.

Cherie Rivers Ndaliko, “In the Presence of Absence: Commemoration and Disavowal in Congo,”

Critical Inquiry 44 (2018): 766-780.

James E. Tyner, Landscape, Memory, and Post-Violence in Cambodia (New York: Rowman &

Littlefield, 2017).

Dec 04 | The Ruins of War

This session explores the buildings and cities that become targets of armed conflict and wars of

attrition or objects of forfeiture and reparations. We will consider the legacies of such ruptures

and follow their afterlives as ruins that are preserved or rebuilt, as highly symbolic places that

carry traumatic memory across generations, and as sites of imaginative social creation.

Required reading:

Two chapters from Janet Abu-Lughod and Ahmad Sa’di, Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the

Claims of Memory (New York City: Columbia U. Press, 2007).

o Rochelle Davis, “Chapter 2: Mapping the Past, Re-creating the Homeland: Memories

of Village Places in Pre-1948 Palestine,” pp. 53-75.

o Janet Abu-Lughod, “Chapter 3: Return to Half-Ruins: Memory, Postmemory, and

Living History in Palestine,” pp. 77-104.

Azra Aksamija, “Memory-Matrix: A Monument to the Future Heritage,” MIT Project

Documentation (2016): online https://www.azraaksamija.net/memory-matrix/

Martin Coward, “Chapter 2: The Logic of Urbicide,” Urbicide: The Politics of Urban

Destruction (New York: Routledge, 2008): 35-53.

Wendel | F18 Cities of Contested Memory Syllabus Page 13 of 13

Draft 30 Aug 2018

Additional resources:

Howayda Al-Harithy, Lessons in Post-War Reconstruction: Case Studies from Lebanon in the

Aftermath of the 2006 War (New York: Routledge, 2010).

Andrew Herscher, Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict (Stanford:

Stanford U. Press, 2010).

Lynn Meskell, “Negative Heritage and Past Mastering in Archaeology,” Anthropological

Quarterly 75, 3 (2002): 557-574.

John Pendlebury et al eds., Alternative Visions of Post-War Reconstruction: Creating the

Modern Townscape (New York: Routledge, 2014).

Dec 11 | Environmental Afterlives

This session will explore the nature and temporalities of memories of tragic events that are

mediated through ecological environments. Who is most affected by these “ecologies of the

aftermath,” to use Rob Nixon’s term? How does the ecological maintenance of memory affect

our understanding of the relationships between memory and place?

Required reading:

Kate Brown, “Learning to Read: Literacy in More Than Human Landscapes,” [TBC]

(Philadelphia: After Matter Conference University of Pennsylvania, 2018): 1-25.

Rob Nixon, “Chapter 07: Ecologies of the Aftermath: Precision Warfare and Slow

Violence,” Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard U.

Press, 2011): 199-232.

Additional resources:

Lynn Meskell, The Nature of Heritage: The New South Africa (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

Jake Kosek, “The Cultural Politics of Memory and Longing, Understories: The Political Lives of

Forests in Northern New Mexico (Durham: Duke U. Press, 2006): 30-61.

Denis Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison: U. of Wisconsin Press,

1984).