Past Events
– Aylwyn Walsh
riffing off of Donald Rumsfeld
questions that arise on watching Helle Stenum’s documentary film We Carry it Through Us:
Audience responses touch on whose pain is represented, and to what audience.
In answer to how contested histories may be understood by the oppressor, the Archivist answers: ‘it depends what you ask of the material’.
The film explores pedagogies in a complex juxtaposition of forms:
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the oral history in song form juxtaposed with the video game ‘slave trade’ (tetris).
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the ongoing admission that there is so much omission in history textbooks despite documentation existing in archives.
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Virtual online games that enable young people to enact colonial trade.
What kind of pedagogies can attend to the known knowns of trans-atlantic memories and the known unknowns perhaps redolent beyond fixed archives?