Controversies of

Memory
Dr. Will Kurlinkus
Reminder
Paper Proposal
Due
Wednesday
Individual
Monuments:
Remembering Death
• Memento Mori: Graveyard in a
central place in town—
remember death.
• Garden Paradise: Graveyards
where you would think about life
and death as natural. Beautiful
monuments, flowers, benches,
picnics, etc.
• The Lawnscape: Flat graveyards
where you don’t see anything at
all.
What did you find out
about your monument?
Do Monuments
Matter? Especially
if you don’t pay
attention to
them?
Acoma Pueblo:
Sky City
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).
Numbe Whageh:
Albuquerque’s
Cuarto
Centenario
Memorial
The Confederate Flag
• Mississippi’s state flag included as part of it the
confederate flag.
• The University of Mississippi/Ole Miss used it as
their flag (and still have the rebels as a mascot)
• What does celebrating the confederacy and the
south through the confederate flag rhetorically do
to people of color? That students of colors’ tuition
was paying for these flags?
• What does the confederate flag mean? Is it racist?
Is it racist if it’s used by racists?
• After years of protest it was money/college
football that started the change (the SEC refused
to have tournament football games played there).
 Is Removing a
Monument Forgetting
History?
+ What about the
pledge of allegiance?
+ What about “state
loyalty oaths?”
+ Should we
automatically respect
tradition?
+ What does it mean to
be patriotic/
unpatriotic?