Whose culture is it anyway? Latin America's Politics of Memory

GENED 1207 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

Where should Latin America’s cultural patrimony be stored, displayed, and studied, to ensure both historical integrity and cultural significance? Who has the right to keep it? 

Who decides which cultural objects are kept, displayed, or returned to where they came from? Should we tear down monuments that no longer serve us? When an important writer or artist dies, who gets to keep his “stuff”? Should European Museums return indigenous artifacts to their countries of origin? Who owns these objects? 

Latin America’s particular past makes it the perfect space to ask these questions. Having been a colony to multiple European powers for the better part of 400 hundred years, its independence in the 19th Century made it evident that there was no going back to a precolonial past, as their culture seemed intrinsically and inevitably linked to both the prehispanic and the European. And yet, this hasn’t stopped multiple presidents, ambassadors, intellectuals, artists, and academics from reclaiming their “rightful” ownership to everything that is not currently in their specific museums, archives, and institutions.

These inquiries are central to this course, which delves into a range of cultural objects, from indigenous headdresses to murals, from writer’s diaries to famous paintings, considered heritage of Latin America. We will embark on a conceptual and methodological journey, examining the complexities of preserving items for posterity and the intricate power dynamics inherent in the establishment of archival preservation spaces. Through this examination, students will gain a deeper insight into the politics of memory that shape our understanding of cultural identity in the present day.