African American History and Memory

Semester and Year	FA 2009
Course Number	IDSEM-UG1560
Section	001
Instructor	E. Frances White
Days	Mon,Wed
Time	2:00 PM - 3:15 PM
Units	4.0
Level	U
Foundation Requirement

Description

This course looks at the relationships between history, memory, counter-memory, amnesia, and social struggle. Our aim is to track back and forth between learning about the past and about its impact on today. We ask, what gets remembered about African American history, and who does the remembering? In what ways do communities develop collective memories? In what ways do counter-memories emerge? Accordingly, begin by exploring "the past" in West Africa, the ancestral home of most African-Americans in the United States, but we continue the course by asking: what memories of Africa are cultivated or suppressed? Likewise, we ask how experience of slavery in the United States is constituted as a past, remembered and forgotten. Our goal is to achieve a solid grounding in 18th and 19th century African-American history, and to develop conceptual tools for making a complex analysis of the past and of the politics of memory. We may read Tavia Nyongo'o, Toni Morrison, Barbara Chase Riboud, and David Blight.

Course Type

Interdisciplinary Seminars (IDSEM-UG)