Loss and Lived Memory at the Moore’s Ford Lynching Reenactment

Advances in the History of Rhetoric May 2017

Loss and Lived Memory at the Moore’s Ford Lynching Reenactment

Megan Eatman

Abstract

ABSTRACT Each year, members of the Moore’s Ford Movement conduct a memorial rally for and reenactment of a lynching that took place in 1946 near Monroe, Georgia. While a lynching memorial that includes a reenactment may sound suspect, particularly because lynching reenactments play a role in white supremacist activities, the Moore’s Ford Memorial’s unusual form offers affordances that other lynching memorials do not. This article argues that the memorial’s simultaneous attachment to and critique of necessarily inadequate traces of the past raise questions about what it means to remember violence in situ. Most lynching memorial rhetoric revolves around the narrow archive of lynching photographs produced, for the most part, by lynchers themselves. Through its combination of archival and lived memory, the Moore’s Ford Memorial both tells a broader story and draws attention to the archive’s inability to capture all that was lost. In dwelling in the gap between past and present, the memorial creates a generative space for community action.

Journal: Advances in the History of Rhetoric
Published: 2017-05-04
DOI: 10.1080/15362426.2017.1325411
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Topics: multimodality race and writing multilingual writers

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Cites in this index (3)

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Wearing the City: Memory P(a)laces, Smartphones, and the Rhetorical Invention o…

Rhetoric Society Quarterly
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Rhetoric Society Quarterly
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The archaeology of women in rhetoric: Rhetorical sequencing as a research metho…

Rhetoric Society Quarterly

Also cites 4 works outside this index ↓

Doss (2010)

Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America

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Mitchell (2011)

Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930

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Susan (2014)

The Moore’s Ford Lynching Reenactment: Affective Memory and Race Trauma

Text and Performance Quarterly ↗
Wood (2009)

Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940

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