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In recent years, American culture has seen a surge of longing for a ‘simpler’ past, an imagined ‘golden age.’ From the whitewashed nostalgia of “Make America Great Again” to the rise of Trad Wives, from the carefully curated aesthetics of Cottagecore and Dark Academia to the pandemic-era millennial nostalgia, the US is haunted by what it thinks it has lost and knows it is losing. At the same time, alternative practices of remembrance that engage in critical memory work reconstruct and re-imagine lost queer, indigenous, and Black archives and create alternative nostalgias.
This course explores how American literature, film, digital media, and art engage with practices of remembrance. We read novels, short stories, critical essays, poems, alongside internet trends and visual artworks to analyze how they reproduce, resist, or reimagine the past, present, and the future. We trace nostalgia’s history – considered a curable condition by Swiss doctors in the seventeenth century – and explore the different literary, aesthetic, and critical forms of remembrance and their political functions.
Topics include, but are not limited to nostalgia, critical memory work, cultural memory, personal and collective memory, critical fabulation, Indigenous nostalgia, queer nostalgia and queer temporality, trauma, historiography, and digital nostalgias.
Required Reading:
Shorter texts will be made available on MOODLE. In preparation, students are expected to acquire and read the following novels and watch the following film:
Butler, Octavia. 1979. Kindred. London: Headline, 2018. ISBN: 978-1-4722-5822-9
Blake M. Hausman. Riding the Trail of Tears. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. ISBN: 978-0-8032-3926-5
!!!Content warning!!!: Butler and Hausman's novels depicts distressing scenes including the following: abuse (physical and sexual), ableism (r-slur), amputation, rape, forced family separation, loss of a child, lynching, racial slurs (n-word), racism, slavery, suicide, graphic violence, whipping. Please be prepared for this content and take care as you read this book. These texts are meant to unsettle and invite critical reflection.
- Teacher: Malaika Sutter