“The Coyolxauhqui imperative: a struggle to reconstruct oneself and heal the… woundings, traumas, racism, and other acts of violation que hechan pedazos nuestras almas, split us, scatter our energies, and haunt us.” Gloria Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark
Memory, Trauma, and Performance
SPAN-GA 2968 – 002
Prof. Diana Taylor
Fall. 2023
Monday: 3:45-6:30
Performance Studies Studio
Office Hrs: Tuesday: 3-5 and by appointment
diana.taylor@nyu.edu
Schedule office hours appointment here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pJNu8GnKwfBB_3HXmq3Ham60LDa_HeY5oVnfNvjPwh4/edit?usp=sharing
(Email Allison Brobst at amb22@nyu.edu for access if you cannot open the doc)
Graduate Assistant
Susana Costa Amaral
sca366@nyu.edu
Section I
Class 1 (Sept 11):
This section allows us to explore the key terms, memory, trauma, and performance.
Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed. Section 4
T.O. Toolkit, ZCMP.org
Class 2 (Sept 16):
George Emilio Sanchez, 10-2. PS studio
The workshop will be followed by pizza and a discussion led by Guilherme Estermann Meyer.
Class 3 (Sept 18):
Change in understandings of trauma–both historically and globally
Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through”
Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Intro to Section I and Section II
Artwork: Teresa Margolles (México), “De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar?”
5:30-6:30 Invited Guest: Leda Martins (Brazil), “Spiral Time: Repairing Traumatic Memory.”
Leda Martins will focus on how the Congados—which date back to the 17th century and are still active in Brazil today—have provided their Afro Brazilian adherents independent communities of kinship and control in the context of slavery and ongoing disenfranchisement. Leda Martins is a Distinguished Professor in UFMG, a poet, and Queen of her Congado: Reinado de Nossa Senhora do Rosário do Jatobá.
Class 4 (Sept 25):
Western medicine is slow to understand: “outside the range of usual human experience” (original DSM manual).
Judith Hermon, “Truth and Repair”
Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score (pdf, ch 4, 5)
Artwork: Carlos Martiel (Cuba), several
Class 5 (Oct 2): Memory
Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember
Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory”
Artwork: Rosana Paulino (Brazil), “Assentamento”
Tuan Andrew Nguyen (Vietnam).
On view at the New Museum until Sept 17
Oct 9 NO CLASS
Class 6 (Oct 10)
Petrona de la Cruz Cruz, class visit
Una mujer desesperada/ A desperate woman
Midterm Assignment: Create working groups and propose projects—each WG will design and lead presentations for final two classes.
Section II
Historical trauma—conquest, enslavement, disenfranchisement
How does trauma get transmitted through generations? How do people ‘heal’ from wounds that predate them, or pay debts that are not theirs to pay?
Class 7 (Oct 16: Gloria Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro (Available through NYU Library, JSTOR)
Anzaldúa’s “Healing Wounds”
Artwork: Guadalupe Maravilla (El Salvador and US)
Class 8 (Oct 23): Octavia Butler, Kindred
Denise Ferrera da Silva, Unpayable Debt.
Artwork: Orí, Raquel Gerber and Beatriz Nascimento (Brazil, documentary)
Section III
Political —Topics can include: the performance of state power and state sponsored terror; the individual and collective nature of trauma; the study of embodied practices such as testimony and witnessing; truth commissions; the construction of archives of testimony; testimony, its use in literature, museums, and pedagogy, its dramatizations by others, its archivization; the social role of sites of memory; performances of protest and resistance.
Class 9 (Oct 30):
The legacies of ‘disappearance’ as political terror
Taylor, ‘You Are Here’: The DNA of Performance
Taylor, Villa Grimaldi
Recommended: Chilean Filmmaker Patricio Guzmán Talks Exile, Trauma, and Revolution
Class 10 (Nov 6):
Taylor, “Making Presence” (from ¡Presente!, ch.4).
Artwork: Regina José Galindo (Guatemala), Tierra/Earth, “Carry your dead (Carry your dead),” “Huelas ( 1 and 2) “La Verdad (The Truth)” “No perdemos nada con nacer”
Section IV
Personal trauma
Trauma is never just personal, and never just political. Does personal trauma stem from one definable ‘event’? Or can we think of ‘personal’ trauma as always, to some degree, trauma as inter-relational and social?
Class 11 (Nov 13):
Reparative Memory
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Repartive Reading”
Artwork: Doris Salcedo (Colombia), “Fragmentos”
Class 12 (Nov 20): Maria José Contreras “Talk to the Future”
Class 13 (Nov 27): Final Projects
Class 14 (Dec 4): Final Projects
Class 15 (Dec 11): Last Class