This course explores various ways that Americans have imagined, remembered, and forgotten two cases of racial violence in American history-enslavement and lynching-to uncover the political commitments underlying various, often competing, cultural memories of violence in US history. Students critically analyze a variety of memory projects from memorials and memoirs to films, art, music, photographs, and literature to not only understand how racial violence has been inscribed onto American identity and culture, but to imagine new strategies, steeped in a commitment to justice, to contend with these historical traumas and their legacies.