Topics in St. Louis: Engaging the City: "Hidden" St. Louis

AMERICAN CULTURE STUDIES 314M

Geographer Peirce Lewis had argued that "our human landscape is our unwitting autobiography," giving tangible form to our shared tastes, values, aspirations, and even fears. It also reveals efforts to exert control--over people, space, resources, and collective identity. St. Louis represents an especially challenging case study: much of its historical fabric has been altered or destroyed, and bears the imprint of White control and a history of racial segregation. This fieldwork course explores the city's "hidden" history, focusing on lost, endangered, or forgotten sites. Some are associated with vexing or violent histories, or contested memory; others are a product of disregard, "benign neglect," or worse--wholesale erasure, as is the case with a series of Native American burial mounds that once stood on the Arch grounds and in Forest Park, not to many immigrant and African American neighborhoods cleared in the name of urban "renewal." Drawing on a range of sources and disciplinary methods, students will engage creatively with elusive features of the cultural landscape, seeking to "locate" them spatially, materially, and historically, and to understand their sociopolitical significance, especially in relationship to better-known landmarks and celebrated sites. How have such features contributed to public culture and identity in the past? How might they yet be reclaimed, and incorporated into the public imagination, whether through storytelling and preservation or public history/memorialization? The course requires individual and small-group site visits; fieldnotes and short analytical / reflections papers; and a more speculative final project on a site of students choosing. AMCS 314M fulfills the fieldwork requirement for AMCS majors/minors.
Course Attributes: EN H; BU Hum; AS HUM; FA HUM; AR HUM

Section 01

Topics in St. Louis:
INSTRUCTOR: Kolk
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