Description:

Fall keynote of the Kaplan Humanities Institute's Memorializing Dialogue:

Monuments of Omission: Erasure in the Memory Work of Indigenous Cultures and Contemporary Media

While absence, erasure and invisibility are often regarded as antithetical to memory, these tropes have proven integral to both theories of the monument and contemporary practices of memorialization. Stubblefield’s presentation will explore this counter-intuitive relation by considering the postwar “counter-monument” and its relation to a broader ecology of contemporary media. O'Brien’s presentation will consider the ways Indigenous public intellectuals engage with memorialization as counter-narrative, taking as a touchstone the upcoming 400th commemoration of Plymouth, Massachusetts through the Pokanoket sachem known as Massasoit.

Co-presented with the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research and Kaplan Humanities Institute. 

Jean M. O’Brien (citizen, White Earth Ojibwe Nation), Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Northrop Professor of History at the University of Minnesota and co-author with Lisa Blee of Monumental Mobility: The Memory Work of Massasoit (North Carolina, 2019).

in conversation with

Thomas Stubblefield, Associate Professor of Art History and Media Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, and author of 9/11 and the Visual Culture of Disaster (Indiana University Press, 2014).

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The 2019-2020 Humanities Dialogue: MEMORIALIZING

A year-long public conversation about commemorating, contesting, and claiming from humanistic perspectives.

What stories do monuments tell?
When is remembrance also a repression?
How does memorializing shape the present?
How do we negotiate collective and disputed memories?

Presented in partnership with multiple Northwestern departments and programs, the Memorializing Dialogue will include talks by distinguished scholars and artists from different disciplinary perspectives.