From our colleagues in the Oral History Master’s Program…
“Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.”– Toni Morrison |
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“What the colonial process does, or any process of domination, is [enact] the erasure of the memory of the subjugated. You erase the memory of who they are, the memories of the past, the memory of their being as a people. So, after erasing that memory, you plant another memory— the memory of the colonizer or the memory of the one who’s dominating. So, in that case, the memory of the dominating becomes the beginning of your memory. There’s a lot of power politics to do with memory.” – Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o, Kenyan author In this series, we highlight the work of artists, scholars, and knowledge-keepers whose works attend to what Toni Morrison describes as the “pitched battle between remembering and forgetting.” (Morrison 2019) The reparative labor of re-memory invites us to recognize the ways that we are intimately bound up with undocumented or under-documented histories and the urgent need for “reconstituting and recollecting a usable past.” Kenyan author and scholar Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o, whose work seeks to redress the historical amnesia and “dismemberment” of the colonial enterprise, sees memory as “the site of dreams, and of desire, is thus crucial to the construction of our being.” From Yohance Lacour, whose audio documentary work You Didn’t See Nothin deftly weaves memoir and investigative reporting, recontextualizing and reexamining the impact of a hate crime on the south side of Chicago and on the life of Lacour himself, to documentary filmmaker Rodrigo Reyes, whose films enact multiple forms of participatory authorship to create narratives that emerge as a third space wherein the hidden poetry of marginalized communities can flourish; to scholar Edgar Garcia. Garcia’s book Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis takes the Maya creation story, The Popol Vuh, and explores its history and relevance in contemporary moments of crisis,; to Renata Cherlise, writer, artist, and founder of Black Archives, a “gathering place for Black memory and imaginations,” we will engage in conversations on listening, authorship, and knowledge-keeping. As Thiong’o asserts, “Creative imagination is one of the greatest of re-membering practices.” |
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Events will take place on Thursday evenings (ET) from 6-7:00PM and will be either virtual and in-person. |
Series Lineup: |
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Thursday, September 26 | 6pm-7:00pm ET Thursday, October 24 | 6pm-7:00pm ET Thursday, November 14 | 6pm-8:00pm ET [In-person Event] Thursday, December 5 | 6pm-8:00pm ET |