Knowing California: Memory and Transformation
About the Cluster
Bridging multiple disciplines and practices, this research cluster invites conversation between ways of knowing the places that are currently arrayed under the name of “California.” Scaling up from smaller, specific sites to larger localities, ecological regions, and political and educational jurisdictions, this cluster seeks to get outside the dominant national depiction of California as the ultimate result of Anglo-American settlement moving westward. It explores the possibilities of collective memory-keeping, from historical and pedagogical narratives to outdoor art installations to storytelling and ceremony, aiming to transform public understandings of systematically marginalized groups and to generate new knowledge better suited to the conditions of the mid-twenty-first century.
“Knowing California: Memory and Transformation” deeply engages with the 2024-25 THI theme, as the very category of the human was a crucial tool in the European quest to dominate this land. Spanish juridical and ecclesiastical categories divided humanity into “people of reason” and lesser “barbarians.” Anglo-Americans later imported pseudo-scientific racial hierarchies that were enforced with particular viciousness in the territory–not only upon Native peoples but upon the many diverse populations who later arrived, particularly among Black, Mexican/Latinx, Asian American and Filipino migrants whose political and economic rights were constrained in order to reproduce white supremacy in the new U.S. territory.
By depicting the California landscape as vast, empty, and underdeveloped, settler ideologies recast the link between humans and place as a relationship of property and citizenship, rather than as a relationship of reciprocal care expressed in specific ways by different Indigenous peoples. On a conceptual level, dis-placement aimed to sever ancient connections of people to particular lands and to discredit their ways of knowing and being in the world. On a pragmatic level, it entailed the forced physical displacement of hundreds of thousands of persons. Finally, the land itself was dis-placed by the engine of colonialism, as environmentally destructive practices such as mining, cattle ranching, monocrop agriculture, and the massive redirection of watercourses. In contrast, transformational memory-work can emerge from place-specific knowledge: from a return to Indigenous stewardship practices, recognition of sacred sites, species rehabitation, and the propagation of new terms and technologies. This research group contends that knowing “California” differently informs theories of the “human”—reflecting the way this category has been co-constituted through place, landscape, and ecology.
Co-Principal Investigators
Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Literature
Martin Rizzo-Martinez, Film & Digital Media
Affiliated Faculty
Lindsey Dillon, Sociology
Rekia Jibrin, Education
Karolina Karlic, Art
Dimitris Papadopoulos, History of Consciousness
Eric Porter, History, History of Consciousness, CRES
Zac Zimmer, Literature
____________
Banner Image: Photo of a mural on the Women’s Building in San Francisco, California, by Piermario Eva on Unsplash.