History and Memory Seminar taught jointly at AUB and AUC – Fall 2014 Hakem al-Rustom and Nadia Bou Ali Synopsis The relationship between History and Memory has occupied the attention of many fields of inquiry from history and anthropology to psychoanalysis and and philosophy. While memory has been conventionally thought of as a category for understanding the role of the past in the formation of the individual subject, the implications of memory on collective social formations has been a point of more recent investigation in the humanities and social sciences. For example, Maurice Halbwachs notion of ‘collective memory’, Pierre Nora’s ‘sites of memory’, and Paul Connerton’s ‘organized forgetting’ shed the light on the ways in which societies remember, commemorate as well as forget and erase events and episodes of individual and collective pasts. Memory becomes a site on which a society/culture/ community projects its anxieties about repetition, change, representation, authenticity, and identity. The relationship between the past and the present is at the core of memory studies and to a large extent history as a scholarly practice. The course aims to explore various ways of thinking of the relationship between history and memory, as well as problematizes the clear-cut distinction between the ‘past’, the ‘present’, and the ‘future’ as separate temporal units of analysis. It provides a theoretical introduction to the field of memory studies and the more recent critiques of it by examining a variety of themes and ethnographies. The course will provide two case studies from Lebanon and Turkey; the two areas of research interests of the instructors. For the collective efforts of creating ‘imagined’ socio-political communities (Benedict Anderson), history and memory are important aspects to understand such imaginations and the ways states sought to write history and control memory. Meanwhile, collective memories are equally important sites of contesting the hegemonic rendition of the past bringing to the surface the subverted episodes of state violence and inequalities. Furthermore, memories are sites of resistance where minorities and subaltern groups make cultural and political claims through asserting their right to historicity (Michel-Rolph Trouillot). As such the course unbinds and unpacks the political implications of the seemingly natural dichotomy between remembering and forgetting. The readings and discussions venture into unthinking temporalities of the past and present as determinants of the future that is to come. The readings will explore anthropological approaches to the study of memory as stated above as well as the works of thinkers like Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan, Lauren Berlant, Robert Meister, Reinhardt Koselleck. Through this cross-disciplinary engagement, history and memory are entertained as sites of knowledge production around following themes: Themes and Outline Themes and Scopes Week 1: Introduction to the Course Topic One: Theorizing and Conceptualizing the Past Week 2: (Joint selection of readings) Topic Two: Approaches to Memory: Subjectivity and Collectivity Weeks 3: Approaches from Sociology (HR) Week 4: Approaches from Psychoanalysis 1 (NB) Week 5: Approaches from Psychoanalysis 2 (NB) Topic Three: Locating Collective Memory Week 6: Space (HR) Week 7: Nationalism and Political Projects (HR) Week 8: Matterialities of Memory (HR) Topic Four: Memory and Violence Week 9: Loss, Pain, and Unfinished Pasts 1 (NB) Week 10: Justice and Human Rights 1 (NB) Week 11: Justice and Human Rights 2 (NB) Week 12: Memories of War: Lebanese Case (NB) Topic Five: Memory After the Fact Week 13: Negating, Erasing, and Asserting Memories (HR) Week 14: Exhibiting Memories: The National Museum of the American Indian case (HR) Syllabus Themes and Scopes Week 1: Introduction to the Course Topic One: Theorizing and Conceptualizing Past Week 2: Conceptualizing the Past EH Carr What is History? (Selections) Reinhardt Kosseleck, Future’s Past (On the Relation of Past and Future in Modern History, Part 1, ch.1-2-3) Constantin Fasolt, The Limits of History (Ch.1, 5) Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History.” In Selected Writings (1929–1940), pp. 389–400. The Politics of Memory Susannah Radstone, Bill Schwarz, ‘Mapping Memory’ in Memory: Histories, Theories, and Debates: 1-15 Anne Norton (1993) ‘Ruling Memory’ Political Theory Vol. 21(3): 453-463. (memory’s relation power) Jean-Rolph Trouillot () ‘The Three Faces of Sans Souci’ in Silencing the Past. (pp. 31–69). (one story is remembered/interpreted in 3 different ways) Topic Two: Approaches to Memory: Subjectivity and Collectivity Suggested Film Screening: “Memories of Underdevelopment” Tomás Gutiérrez Alea Weeks 3: Collective Memory: Approaches from the Sociology Maurice Halbwachs (1950) On Collective Memory. New York: Harper and Row. Pierre Nora (1989) ‘Between Memory and History: Les Leius de Memoire’. Representations 26:7-25. Paul Connerton (1989) How Societies Remember. Cambridge UP. Weeks 4: Approaches from Psychoanalysis 1: The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud (selections on Deja Vue and forgetting- TBA) Sigmund Freud, Screen Memories p.303-322 Norman Brown, Life Against Death, The psychoanalytical meaning of history, Introduction, + TBA) Michael S.Roth, Trauma, Representation, and Historical Consciousness, in Memory, Trauma, and History, pp.79-124. Week 5: Approaches from Psychoanalysis 2: Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (Selections) Lauren Berlant Cruel Optimism, (Introduction, Chapter One) Lauren Berlant, “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics.” In Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law, pp. 49–84. Ed. Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Topic Three: Locating Collective Memory Week 6: Space Boyarin, Jonathan (1994). ‘Space, Time, and the Politics of Memory’ in Remapping Memory: The Politics of TimeSpace, Jonathan Boyarin, ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. (pp. 1–38). Foote K. 1997. Shallowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy. Austin: Univ. Tex. Press (landscape as carrier of meaning) Brown K. 2003. The Past in Question: Modern Macedonia and the Uncertainties of the Nation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press (Competing narratives of a city) Joel Bahloul (). The Architecture of Memory: a Jewish-Muslim household in colonial Algeria 1937-1962. Slyomovics S. 1994. The memory of place: rebuilding the pre-1948 Palestinian village. Diaspora J. Transnatl. Stud. 3:157–68 Navaro-Yashin, Yael. “Affective Spaces, melancholic objects, and the production of anthropological knowledge,”Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 15, 1-18 Week 7: Nationalism and Political Projects Gillis, JR, ed. 1994. Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press Malkki, Liisa (1995) Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees. University of Chicago Press. Feldman I. 2006. ‘Home as a refrain: remembering and living displacement in Gaza’. Hist. Memory 18:10–47 Allen L. 2006. The polyvalent politics of martyr commemorations in the Palestinian Intifada. Hist. Mem. 18:107–38 White GM. 2004. National subjects: September 11 and Pearl Harbor. American Ethnologist 31(3): 293–310 Washabaugh, William (2012). Flamenco Music and National Identity in Space. Ashgate. Week 8: Materialities of Memory (Food, festivals, museums, cemeteries) Ghassan Hage, Migration, Food, Memory and Home Building in Memory: Histories, Theories, and Debates edited by Susannah Radstone, Bill Schwarz Sutton D. 2001. Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory. London: Berg Siskind J. 1992. The invention of Thanksgiving: a ritual of American nationality. Crit. Anthropol. 12(2):167–91 Schielke S. 2008. Policing ambiguity: Muslim saints’ day festivals and the moral geography of public space in Egypt. Am. Ethnol. 35(4):539–52 Shenoda, Maryann (2007). ‘Displacing Dhimmi, Maintaining Hope: Unthinkable Coptic Representations of Fatimid Egypt’ International Journal of Middle East Studies 39(4): 606–606. Gür, Aslı (2007). ‘Stories in Three Dimensions: Narratives of Nation and the Anatolian Civilizations Museum’ in The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey. Ersa Ozyurek. (pp. 40– 69). Doris, Francis, Leonie Kellaher, and Georgina Neophytou (2002). ‘The Cemetery: A Site for the Construction of Memory, Identity, and Ethnicity’ In Social Memory and History: Anthropological Perspectives, eds. JJ Climo, MG Cattell, pp. 131–42. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Topic Four: Memory and Violence Week 9: Loss, Pain, and Unfinished Pasts Walter Benjamin, Critique of Violence Talal Asad, “Reflections on Cruelty and Torture.” In Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, pp. 100–24. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Talal Asad “Thinking about Agency and Pain.” In Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, pp. 67–99. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Weeks 10-11: Justice and Human Rights Robert Meister, After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights. Columbia UP. (Ch.1-2-3-10) Week 12: Memories of War: The Lebanese Case Film Screening and reading of text by Walid Sadek, The Next of Survivors: The One Man Village, directed by: Simon al-Habre Ernest Gellner, How the System Manages to go on Functioning in War-Torn Lebanon, Times February 1980 Max Weiss, In the Shadow of Sectarianism (Selections) Ghasan Hage, The Fetishism of Identity: class, politics, and processes of identification in Lebanon, unpublished dissertation, Ch. 4, p.110-150 Ilham Khuri Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860-1914. (Berkeley, 2010)pp.1-15 Usama Makdisi, Cultures of Sectarianism, (University of California Press, 2000) p.1-14 Nadia Bou Ali, Butrus al-Bustani and the Shipwreck of the Nation Samir Khalaf, Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon (selections) Topic Five: Memory After the ‘Fact’ Week 13: Negating, Erasing, and Asserting Memories Lisa Yoneyama (1999) Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory. University of California Press. (Hiroshima Memorial erases the South Korean victims of the Bomb) Sturken M. 1997. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. U California Press. (Vietnam war memorial in DC erases Vietnamese suffering) Jeffery L. 2006. Historical narrative and legal evidence: judging Chagossians’ high court testimony. PoLAR: Pol. Legal Anthropol. Rev. 29(2):228–53 (negating through depoliticization and hyperindividualization) On the Truth Commissions: Recognizing State-Sponsored Violence Hayner P. 2002. Unspeakable Truths: Facing the Challenge of Truth Commissions. New York: Routledge. French B. 2009. Technologies of telling: discourse, transparency, and erasure in Guatemalan Truth Commission testimony. J. Hum. Rights 8(1):92–109 Ross FC. 2003. Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. London: Pluto Week 14: Exhibiting Memories: The National Museum of the American Indian case Scheper-Hughes N. 2001. Ishi’s brain, Ishi’s ashes. Anthropol. Today 17(1):12–18 James Clifford, Four Northwest Coast Museums: Travel Reflections.” In Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990). Sonya Atalay, “No Sense of Struggle: Creating a Context for Survivance at the NMAI,” American Indian Quarterly, 30 (3/4): 597-618. Patricia Penn Hilden, “Race for Sale: Narratives of Possession in Two ‘Ethnic’ Museums,” The Drama Review 44, 3, (Fall 2000): 11-36. READ PP. 23-33. Claire Smith “Decolonising the museum: the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC,” Antiquity 79 (2005): 424–439. Fath Davis Ruffins , “Culture Wars Won and Lost: Ethnic Museums on the Mall, Part I: The National Holocaust Museum and the National Museum of the American Indian,” Radical History Review (1997), 79-100. Amy Lonetree and Amanda J. Cobb., eds. The National Museum of the American Indian: critical conversations. (Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 2008). Duane Blue Spruce and Tanya Thrasher, eds. The land has memory : indigenous knowledge, native landscapes, and the National Museum of the American Indian. Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press , c2008. Amanda J. Cobb, ‘The National Museum of the American Indian as Cultural Sovereignty,” American Quarterly 57 no 2 (June 2005): 485-506. Background Readings: Hermann Lebovics, Post-colonial museums . . . how the French and American models differ.” History News Network [electronic journal], George Mason University. hnn.us/articles/6939.html Richard C. King, Segregated Stories: The Colonial Contours of the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument In Dressing in feathers: the construction of the Indian in American popular culture, edited by S. Elizabeth Bird. (Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1996.) Eric Freedman, “Protecting Sacred Sites on Public Land: Religion and Alliances in the Mato Tipila-Devils Tower Litigation.” American Indian Quarterly 31, No. 1 (Winter2007): 1-22.
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