AML 4213 Spring 2023 KIlgore

How does Florida (especially Tallahassee) choose to preserve, narrate, and commemorate its early history through museums, memorials, monuments, and other historical sites? What does Mission San Luis say—or not say—about Spanish colonization of the area, the Goodwood Museum about plantation slavery? How does our “public memory” of Florida change, how are official histories challenged, when we prioritize Black and Indigenous voices and knowledge, literature and culture? And more to the point for this class, can we think of literature as itself a form of cultural memory opening up alternative narrative perspectives on Florida history and culture? This course will tackle questions such as these by surveying the early literature of Florida from the period of first nations through the nineteenth century, and then putting our reading into conversation with sites of public memory in and around Tallahassee. That means you will be making a few site visits in town and analyzing the material rhetorics of history and place. The goal is to understand the political, cultural, and literary legacy of Florida, yesterday and today, from an anti-racist, anti-colonial viewpoint. We will consider the power of early Florida literature to shape our contemporary politics of public memory; conversely, we will approach sites of public memory as narrative forms which tell weighted stories about Florida at the intersection of fact and fiction, history and ideology.

This course meets the pre-1800 requirement.