Thursday, 14 November, 4pm – 5:30pm (UCO: Room 36)
Our second meeting considers Alison Landsberg’s work on Race, Memory and Film. Prof. Landsberg is a University of St Andrews Global Fellow in Semster 2.
Readings:
• Landsberg, ‘Chapter 3. Remembering Slavery: Childhood, Desire, and the Interpellative Power of the Past’, in Prosthetic Memory. The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia UP, 2004) pp. 81-110.
• Landsberg, ‘Horror vérité: politics and history in Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017)’, Continuum, 32 (5), 2018, pp. 629-642
• Landsberg, ‘Post-Postracial America. On Westworld and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture’ in Cultural Politics, 14 (2), 2018, pp. 198-215.
Alison Landsberg, Chapter 3. Remembering Slavery, in Prosthetic Memory
Landsberg, Horror v rit politics and history in Jordan Peele s Get Out 2017
Summary of the event (written by Jorge Sarasola):
In the second meeting of CIMS’s Reading Group we discussed the work of Alison Landsberg, in anticipation of the Public Lecture she was meant to deliver in St Andrews (now cancelled due to covid-19). Best known for coining the term ‘prosthetic memory’, we began the session by discussing a chapter from her seminal Prosthetic Memory (2004), entitled ‘Remembering Slavery.’ Subsequently, we examined two of her most recent articles, ‘Horror vérité: politics and history in Jordan Peele’s Get Out’ (2018), and ‘Post Post-Racial America: On Westworld and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture’ (2018).
In this session, we discussed the usefulness of Landsberg’s ‘prosthetic memory’ as a conceptual toolbox we can use as researchers. This term came under criticism from researchers into the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide for suggesting that one who did not experience these traumatic experiences could effectively acquire memories (albeit artificial) through films. Equally, the characterization of these memories as ‘prosthetic’ was also deemed problematic, as scholars in disability studies have identified.
Other members of the Reading Group, however, felt that some of the tools she developed in order to understand the ways memories are consumed in our globalized world through films are particularly revealing. These exchanges led us to unpack in detail Landsberg’s characterization of ‘prosthetic memory’ to determine its useful aspects and its more questionable ones. The fact that she often uses memory metaphorically was met with criticism from some quarters. This led to an axiomatic discussion on how we define ‘memory’ in our academic endeavours. It is true that Landsberg’s idea of ‘prosthetic memory’ strains greatly from a more traditional understanding of what can count as a personal memory. However, the whole field of Cultural Memory is to a great extent premised on the idea that personal, organic memories are only a small portion of a much larger story. Inter-generational memories, post-memory, collective memory are all concepts which would face similar charges.
Little time was left to discuss Landsberg’s recent papers. Her positive reading of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in terms of its memory practices offered a marked contrast to Rigney’s examination of how the European House of History failed to engage with memory effectively. The analysis of two exemplars of popular culture, the film, Get Out, and the television show, Westworld, also led to interesting discussions about the cultural products we select to examine in our own investigations, and how we can use memory discourse to shed light on products of popular culture.