Occupy Everything: Revolution in American Memory, 1791 - Occupy Wall Street
J. Michelle Coghlan - University of Manchester
This interdisciplinary third-year seminar explores the figure of revolution and the role of radical memory in American culture. Because the time of revolution is always “out of joint”—always looking backwards to 1776 and 1789 and forwards to the flash of the wished-for/ever-feared yet-to-come—our study proceeds on a loosely chronological approach that begins with two takes on revolution in contemporary U.S. culture: Occupy: Scenes from Occupied America, a collection of eyewitness accounts from NYC, and Christopher Nolan’s nightmarish vision of class warfare in The Dark Knight Rises. We then turn to the ways that nineteenth-century American writers and orators recollected the 1791 Haitian revolution as an abolitionist clarion call, a revenant of 1776, and a terrifying portent of antebellum slave revolt before exploring the ways that returning to the Paris Commune of 1871 allowed Americans to refashion their own revolutionary past even as it gave them a new road map for occupying revolution. We conclude our study by examining the aftershocks and promise of revolution in a variety of literary and cultural responses to the 1886 Haymarket bombing and the 1968 trial of the Chicago 8.
In addition to situating literary texts within their wider historical contexts, our aim in this module is to link these cultural issues back to the larger question of the relationship between literary form and cultural memory, interrogating the ways that a variety of genre—among them, manifestoes, poetry, oratory, realist fiction, and film—mediate and refashion national narratives of, as well as debates on, revolution and the larger meaning of American identity and democracy. This research seminar also introduces students to a variety of relevant conceptual approaches to the study of media and cultural memory as well as radical forms and popular culture. Finally, it gives them the opportunity to hone their archival sleuthing skills in relevant digital archives and develop group presentations on their findings.
In addition to situating literary texts within their wider historical contexts, our aim in this module is to link these cultural issues back to the larger question of the relationship between literary form and cultural memory, interrogating the ways that a variety of genre—among them, manifestoes, poetry, oratory, realist fiction, and film—mediate and refashion national narratives of, as well as debates on, revolution and the larger meaning of American identity and democracy. This research seminar also introduces students to a variety of relevant conceptual approaches to the study of media and cultural memory as well as radical forms and popular culture. Finally, it gives them the opportunity to hone their archival sleuthing skills in relevant digital archives and develop group presentations on their findings.
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