Introduction

MEMORY STUDIES
Who wants whom
to remember what,
why, and how?
“The groups I am a part of
at any time give me the
means to reconstruct them
upon condition, to be sure,
that I turn toward them
and adopt, at least for the
moment, their way of
thinking” (38).
—Maurice Halbwachs
 Who(the rhetor) wants
whom (the audience) to
remember what (the
cultural standard/ideal),
why (the exigence/motive),
and how (the
message/delivery)?
Who Are
You?
1. Name
2. Areas of interest (right
now, at least)
3. Memorable tradition
among your family
and/or friends.
A Class Tour
Taking Notes in
This Class
1. Record the thesis of each text
and its key research questions.
2. Record interesting examples.
3. Key terms and definitions.
4. Key quotations
5. Connections to other texts
6. Connections to your own
interests
Weekly
Presentations
• 30-40 minutes lead discussion
(not lecture)
• Goal is not to simply present the
material—it is to activate
discussion on it.
• Give us key arguments, ideas
and terms while making us think
in new and intriguing ways.
• Put readings in conversations.
• Give us some activities.
• Make a summative handout
with key quotes, arguments,
and terms defined and page
numbered
Key Ideas on Collective Memory
Keywords: authenticity, persuasion, hegemony, commemoration, tradition, ritual, god memories,
inequity, forgetting, trauma, time, space, technology

1. Collective memory is processual: it constantly forms, clashes, changes, shifts, is

forgotten, and is performed.
2. Collective memory is unpredictable: the ways we remember events changes
unpredictably and often irrationally (what sticks with us?, appropriation, &
today’s glory is tomorrow’s shame).
3. Collective memory is partial: no single memory contains all we know about the
remembered.
4. Collective memory is useable: we use memory to do things (connecting to
people/community, ideas, arguments; selling products; arguing about laws
(think zoning); praising and blaming).
5. Collective memory is both particular and universal: we remember individually in
groups.
6. Collective memory is material: we remember through things and places.
From Barbie Zelizer’s “Reading the Past Against the Grain”
Onate’s Foot
• Who wants whom to remember what, why,
and how?
• What does this piece teach us about the
nature of collective memory?
• How was this memory of Onate forgotten (his
murderousness and banishment)?
• What is at stake here?
• What does it mean to celebrate heritage if
that heritage is at once marginalized and
terrible?
• About the act of memorialization?
• What do monuments do?
• What solutions are there?
• counter-memory is an individual act of
resistance, to relentlessly question the veracity
of "history as true knowledge” (Pritika
Chowdhry).
 History of Memory Studies
1. Started with psychologists studying recall (ps actually is so
much older!)
2. Bergson, Bartlett, Halbwachs (1920s & 30s): Memory isn’t
just in us (banking model) it’s socially constructed. (vs.
history’s question—what really happened?)
3. Post-WWII “Memory Boom” (1945): Hitler’s propaganda
but also his attempt to exterminate a culture (and its
memories and traditions) meant.
• This also means memory studies as a field has largely
been concerned with traumatic memory. It is also why
cultural (in Europe) and collective (in the U.S.) memory
mean roughly the same thing but get dissociated.
4. Invention of the field (1980s): Pierre Nora and les lieux de
memoire (sites of memory that call up national history-–
but today are so fragmented as to not have a true
collective memory). Why the 80s? It took this long to
realize we should be studying oppressed cultures?!
5. Technologizing memory (1980s-90s): the technologies
by which we communicate memory. The VHS tape but
earlier it was the popular movie, the photograph, the
printing press, writing itself, and today social media. How
do such technologies change memory, warp it, record
it? What do they urge us to do?
Rhetoric is
behind the times
HAS BEEN CONCERNED WITH
“FORMAL” MEMORY RHETORIC:
SPEECHES, MEMORIALS, MUSEUMS
Nostalgia & Its
Discontents
• Give me an example of a rhetorical
use of nostalgia.
• Nostalgia as artificial, manipulative,
evil, dumb vs. a memory studies
approach to it (Boym here).
• 1688: nostos (to return home) + algia
(pain/longing)
• Nostalgia today is homeostatic
• The off-modern
• What does it mean to be in a nostalgia
boom?
• Restorative (truth and tradition—we
can return to the ideal) vs. reflective
nostalgia (understands its own
artificiality, revels in fragments and
simultaneous traditions).
Afro-Futurism

• Who wants whom to remember what,

why, and how?
• What does this piece teach us about the
nature of collective memory?
• What memory work is being done here?
• Is afro-futurism a nostalgic culture? An off-
modern one? A neostalgic one?
• Sankofa bird (Akan people of Ghana):
“Go back and get it,” “it is not taboo to
fetch what is at risk of being left behind.”
• Counter memory à Counter futurism
Cottagecore
• Who wants whom to remember
what, why, and how?
• What does this piece teach us
about the nature of collective
memory?
• What memory work is being
done here?
• Is cottage core a nostalgic
culture? What does it rhetorically
seek to do?
• What does it mean for Black
creators to participate in a
culture of memory that
historically excluded/abused
them? What does this tell us
about the nature of memory?
Klosterman: On Generations “The 90s”
• What is a generation? How is it defined? By whom
and for what?
• When does a cultural decade begin and end?
• What are a generation’s metrics of evaluation?
Perceptions of work? Pop? Traumas?
• How do generations define time?
• What marks recent cultural decades?
• The 90s ethos (aka Gen X ethos): “an
adversarial relationship with the unseemliness of
trying too hard” (2).
• Naming a generation: “It allows people to
express prejudice toward large chunks of the
populace without any risk” (8)
• The reminiscence bump
• Nostalgia for a previous decade
• “Cool”
• A generation is a feeling of a memory that
remains after it is over
• Arguments for and against generations as a cultural
mode?
• Caricature. White. Teenage.