The Chimalpahin Conference 2007:

Colonial and Post-Colonial Remembering and Forgetfulness

Peter L. Waldman

Deptartment of Urban Education

The City University of New York

Who was Charlotte Corday? This is a question that historians, social theorists, artists, and playwrights have struggled with, in certain instances, for over two centuries. There is no answer to this question of course; the “real” Corday- if such a unified subject ever existed- has vanished in a sea of words and images that signify dominant discursive practices, androcentric knowledge production, and gendered representations in history and in the fine and performing arts of a committed- if not criminal- political actor who happened to be a woman.

I will attempt to negotiate spaces for Corday’s representations to exist within several feminist theoretical frameworks: Postmodern feminist history, feminist standpoints- including radical (critical) feminism and postcolonial feminism- and poststructuralist feminism, delimiting reified knowledge production concerning Corday’s androcentric representations in history and in performance. I will also begin to imagine a microhistorical multi-modal interdisciplinary undergraduate-level history/arts curriculum through which both traditional and alternative (postcolonial) histories and traditionally structured and modernist/postmodernist dramatic literatures and films are used to re-imagine, counter, and problematize gendered representations of Corday in history and in performance wherein historically silenced student voices- the politically oppressed (Latin American U.S. immigrants, Arab-Americans); African-American men and women (the ancestors of slaves, victims of a draconian United States criminal justice system and of institutionalized racism, in general) might begin to generalize Corday's historically/locally specific constructed identities and representations to recast their own socially constructed roles.

In observing the cooption of Corday’s representations by dominant historical discourses and the reified knowledges that result from such practices, the college classroom becomes a transformative field of democratic, critical pedagogy where such radical transformations of student identity and self-representation may begin to take shape.