Body & Memory in Contemporary American Art 4219-SD177
This course provides an in-depth, interdisciplinary investigation into how contemporary technologies reshape experiences of memory, presence, and historical consciousness. Focusing on American art from the late 20th century to the present, we will consider themes such as archives, surveillance, digital embodiment, self-imaging, and the online circulation of archival images. The curriculum engages heavily with advanced frameworks in memory studies, affect theory, psychoanalysis, and cyberfeminism. Crucially, the course contextualizes these technological shifts within global and hemispheric frameworks, examining works by artists from South America, the Caribbean, and the African diaspora to challenge localized or monocultural narratives of history and trauma.
Classes:
1. Introduction to memory studies
2. Collective memory framework
3. Intergenerational haunting
4. Artist as archivist
5. Family frames
6. Repetition and difference
7. Traumatic possessions
8. Wound
9.. Touching Feeling
10. Listening to images
11. Memory landscapes
12. Body and screen
13. Dear Cyborgs
14. Beyond body
15. The future of memory studies
Course coordinators
Type of course
Mode
Prerequisites (description)
Learning outcomes
KNOWLEDGE:
- knows and understands the main theories, movements, and methodologies within memory studies, affect theory, and the politics of the body in contemporary art and visual culture of the United States,
- knows and understands advanced terminology, research tools, and theoretical traditions (including psychoanalysis, cyberfeminism, and diasporic studies) necessary to analyze embodiment, surveillance technologies, and the digital circulation of archives,
- knows and understands the specificity of contemporary American culture, focusing on how new media, internet culture, and experiences of trauma redefine subjectivity and collective memory across diverse social groups and diasporas
SKILLS:
- is able to use acquired knowledge to formulate and innovatively solve complex research problems, and conduct critical, in-depth analysis and interpretation of contemporary artworks, new media, and archival artistic practices,
- selects, adapts, and applies advanced methodological tools, and interprets interdisciplinary source texts and theoretical literature, taking into account their cultural, technological, and historical contexts,
- communicates fluently with diverse audiences and conducts academic debates on specialized American Studies topics in English, utilizing precise scholarly terminology.
SOCIAL COMPETENCIES:
-critically assess their own knowledge as well as consumed visual and digital content, demonstrating deep sensitivity to the ethical, political, and social dimensions of surveillance technologies, minority representations, and mechanisms of exclusion.
Assessment criteria
Final grade depends on the following criteria:
Final Essay (an in-depth visual analysis of a selected artwork or new media phenomenon, incorporating methodologies related to memory studies, new media and diasporic studies)
Presentation & Class Moderation based on one of the texts
Active participation
Attendance: the maximum number of missed classes: 2.
The lectures will take place remotely and synchronically (in "real time")
Bibliography
Fragments from books listed below. At the beginning of the course a list of set texts or other materials for each class will be provided. The materials will be made available to students on Campus platform.
- Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books, 1987 (lub wyd. 4 rozszerzone: Aunt Lute Books, 2012).
- Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press, 2015.
- Campt, Tina M. Listening to Images. Duke University Press, 2017.
- Enwezor, Okwui. Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art. International Center of Photography / Steidl, 2008.
- Enwezor, Okwui, et al. Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America. Phaidon Press, 2021.
- Erll, Astrid. Memory in Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
- Foster, Hal. "An Archival Impulse." October, vol. 110, 2004, pp. 3–22. MIT Press.
- Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." [w:] Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991.
- Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Harvard University Press, 1997.
- Russell, Legacy. Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto. Verso Books, 2020.
- Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke University Press, 2003.
- Silverman, Kaja. The Threshold of the Visible World. Routledge, 1996.
- Silverman, Kaja. Flesh of My Flesh. Stanford University Press, 2009.
- Willis, Deborah, Ellyn Toscano, and Kalia Brooks Nelson, eds. Women and Migration(s): Responses in Art and History. Open Book Publishers, 2019.