CLASSROOM GALLERY: Narrating Memory, History and Place

CLASSROOM GALLERY: Narrating Memory, History and Place
Featuring Gallatin Professor Marie Cruz-Soto
Thursday, November 6
6:00pm
715 Broadway, 5th floor, room 522

Are you interested in participating in on something outside of your
concentration? Debating over which class to make your number one priority?
Registration is around the corner and Student Life has an opportunity to help
you think about your schedule. Classroom Gallery allows you to sample an actual
class that will be offered the following semester. Join us as Gallatin
Professor Marie Cruz-Soto showcases:

For a Place of Our Own: Narrating Memory, History and Place
The past is a contested terrain open to divergent interpretations that can
shape and transform common understandings of places. The meanings endowed to
places dictate the usage and the extent of control that communities can
exercise over them. Thus, the relationship between narrations of the past and
places is as dynamic as it is critical to understand. This course examines how
people imagine a place of their own through historical narrations. It explores
the relationship between memory and history as two different forms of
historical narrations central to the process of transforming places. This
relationship between memory and history is crucial in the struggle of
disempowered communities, especially in (post)colonial contexts, to claim a
place of their own. To approach the subject, course readings include literary
and other scholarly texts ranging from Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, Michel-
Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past and Thongchai Winichakul’s Siam Mapped to
other writings by Pierre Nora, Michel De Certeau and Doreen Massey.