Rhetoric & Public Affairs Mar 2021

Commemorative (Dis)Placement: On the Limits of Textual Adaptability and the Future of Public Memory Scholarship

Chandra Ann Maldonado

Abstract

AbstractAs Kirt Wilson recently noted, contemporary memory and commemorative scholarship can sometimes be too narrowly focused on the centrality of material visual display to a historical narrative’s persuasive power or institutional ideological structures, a tendency that ultimately valorizes and reinforces dominant narratives. In the face of that practice, I ask: How can we understand the extent to which institutionalized histories reinforce and stabilize hegemonic ideals of systems and structures while (dis)placing others? There are several potential answers to this question; the one I want to focus on here has to do with methodological choices. More specifically, I argue for an expansion of the focus of memory and commemorative scholarship to incorporate nondominant historical narratives. This can be achieved by using a methodological approach rooted in circulation theory as a corrective to a long-term focus on dominant (hegemonic) texts. Such an approach allows for memory and commemorative scholarship to employ multiple discourses and practices embedded in commemoration by critically engaging the ways in which hegemonic narratives and identities emerge and are enacted beyond what are traditionally understood to be the “material” structures of public memory.

Journal
Rhetoric & Public Affairs
Published
2021-03-01
DOI
10.14321/rhetpublaffa.24.1-2.0239
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References (28) · 1 in this index

  1. 1. Wilson discusses the ways institutional practices of public memory have historically participated in a pur…
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  2. 2. We are taught to adhere to the “standards” of the discipline, including doing research on the “right” topi…
  3. 3. Martin Law and Lisa M. Corrigan, “On White-Speak and Gatekeeping: Or, What Good Are the Greeks?” Communica…
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  4. 4. Bryan J. McCann, Ashley Noel Mack, and Rico Self, “Communication’s Quest for Whiteness: The Racial Politic…
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  5. 5. For scholarship on public events and national identity, see Jie Gong, "Re-Imaging an Ancient, Emergent Sup…
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Show all 28 →
  1. See also Patricia Davis, "Commemorative Places, Political Spaces: Virginia Indians, the Jamestown Quadricente…
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  2. 6. A. Susan Owen and Peter Ehrenhaus, “Communities of Memory, Entanglements, and Claims of the Past on the Pr…
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  3. 7. For more on the grammar of memory, see G. Dickinson, “Memories for Sale: Nostalgia and the Construction of…
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  4. 8. See Kirt H. Wilson, “The Racial Context of Public Address: Interpreting Violence during the Reconstruction…
  5. 9. See Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Problems and Prospects in the Study of Visual Culture,” Revie…
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  6. 10. Although the authors’ primary body of work is situated within the advancement of visual methodologies and…
  7. 11. See Cara Finnegan, “Doing Rhetorical History of the Visual: The Photograph and the Archive,” in Defining …
  8. 12. For more on context and fragmentation, please see Michael McGee, “Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of…
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  9. 13. Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 49-90.
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  10. Stuckey (2012)
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    Rhetoric & Public Affairs
  11. 15. Chandra A. Maldonado, “Forgetting or Remembering? Amnesic Rhetoric and Circulation of the Past,” in Refra…
  12. 16. Scholars such as Adrienne Rich and Donna Haraway note that our identity situates us with effects on our s…
  13. See also Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial P…
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  14. 17. The summary of this experience is part of a forthcoming book chapter where I explore circulation as amnes…
  15. 18. Here, I use Katrina M. Powell’s notion of “layered displacement” to illustrate how memory and commemorati…
  16. 19. See Hailey Nicole Otis, “Intersectional Rhetoric: Where Intersectionality as Analytic Sensibility and Emb…
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  17. 20. Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 6.
  18. 21. Charles E. Morris III, “My Old Kentucky Homo: Lincoln and the Politics of Queer Public Memory,” in Framin…
  19. 22. Alisha Ebrahimji, Artemis Moshtaghian, and Lauren M. Johnson, “These Confederate Statues Have Been Remove…
  20. 23. For field methods in rhetorical studies, please see Michael K. Middleton et al., Participatory Critical R…
  21. 24. “About the Emmett Till Memory Project,” Emmett Till Memory Project, https://tillapp.emmett-till.org/about/.
  22. 25. “A Creative Protest” is more commonly known as the “Fill Up the Jails” speech. For more on this project, …
  23. 26. “Your Creative Protest” allows visitors to respond to open-ended prompts on dry erase boards as part of t…
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