Memory and Public Space

Catalog description

In this course, we will come to a better understanding of the articulation of public space in its relationship to history and memory. We will first discuss a number of paradigmatic cases in the battle for the public expression of national, regional, or group trauma in the form of monuments, memorials, or sites of commemoration: the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, the Vietnam memorial in DC, the “Parque de la memoria” in Buenos Aires, and the alternative ways of remembering the totalitarian period in Indonesia. Next, we will focus on these negotiations in the recent history of New Orleans: the marks of Katrina in the city today, the ways New Orleans chooses to remember it, and the controversy about the removal of confederate monuments in the city.