Topics in American Culture Studies: Archiving St. Louis: The City as the Crossroads of the World

AMERICAN CULTURE STUDIES 336

The 1904 exposition serves as an important moment anchoring city origin and legacy in a vernacular of unfolding greatness, one richly expressed in the luxuriant, saturating experience of the fair. Organizers sought confirmation that the city and its industrial enterprises belonged among elite urban centers of culture, manufacture, academics, and political importance, thus providing St. Louis a much overdue global(ish) visibility. The penumbra of grandeur and affirming spectacle remains a key feature of most popular accounts of the fair. And yet colonial, racial, and criminalizing methodologies operate in plain sight, visible to any who look past standard narratives constructed out of the real and conceptual archive. Our investigative work seeks to define and dismantle how the fair is conceptualized and referenced today and to see the machinery of power that informs how archives of all kinds claim historical authority by, in part, limiting subjectivities worthy of remembrance. We'll flex our attention between the turn of the century St. Louis of the 1890s/early 1900s and today, mapping correspondences that inform the spatial-racial logics then and now.
Course Attributes: EN H; BU BA; AS HUM; FA HUM; AR HUM

Section 01

Topics in American Culture Studies:
INSTRUCTOR: Walsh
View Course Listing - SP2025