The point of origin for Cultural Memory, Memorials, and Reparative Writing was my interest in the increasingly experimental writing of affect theorists who were shifting into a more personal and subjective idiom than is typical of academic prose. Not only were writers in the field pushing the boundaries of humanistic and social science research methods with these stylistic innovations, but they were introducing a new form of source material through their use of their own feelings and memories as evidence for their studies. Starting with an analysis of how personal memory has come to form an important affective layer in scholarship, I connect the use of memory in writing with the rise of cultural memory studies , thereby moving from personal to collective uses of memory as a basis of research and a source of knowledge. Whereas the first two chapters of this short book present readings of how individual writers employ memory in theoretical texts and memoirs , the last chapter addresses cultural memory as it plays out on the emotional stage of public memorials and monuments . Memoryâpersonal and culturalâhas come to form an important archival source in how we write about, and feel about, culture and history.
That last chapter, on monuments and memorials, took on urgency in the summer of 2017. My focus is on the dearth of American memorial markers to the history of slavery , and in the course of doing that research I learned of the hundreds of Confederate monuments that pockmark the United States. Doing this research in 2015 and 2016, I was stunned by the indifferent or even defensive stances that city councils and state and federal congressional bodies held toward these symbols of oppression . Several states even passed legislation as recently as 2015 and 2016 that prevented or made difficult the removal of Confederate monuments , largely in response to the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina capitol grounds at the late date of 2015. Other Confederate monuments have even gone up in the twenty-first century. These statues have always had their protesters, but before 2017 they stood for the most part undisturbed and unquestioned. People still walk by them every day on their way to work; public parks and government buildings sport these tributes to division and white supremacy ; national and local holidays play out in their shadows in parks across the country. However, in May of 2017, Mayor Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans removed four monuments , three of which featured Confederate generals and one of which commemorated a race riot. As I write, such monuments are being acknowledged, questioned, and in more and more cases, removed. They have also become lightning rods for national feelings: likenesses of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davisâonce overlooked or tolerated as though they were just part of the woodworkâare now sites of anger , despair, and frustration for most, and they are sites of pride and hatred for the white nationalist fringe. This was painfully borne out by the deadly clash between hate groups and counterprotesters in Charlottesville in August of 2017 that had its roots in a conflict over whether to remove a Lee monument . And so far the conversation around monument removal has entirely to do with what they do represent, namely white supremacy , and whether they have any value as reminders of an ugly history. What has not been explored is that the removal of the monuments will do nothing to make the history of the oppressed more visible; what has not been said is that there are so few monuments to black history in the first place that the Confederate monuments amount to double erasure. Taking down the statues does not result in gaps or absences in the material landscape of history insofar as those gaps and absences already exist. The country is already barren of markers to its Native American, Mexican, and African American histories to cite just some of the voids.
And why are memorials important? Arenât multiple histories remembered in art , literature , and academic work? Books can and do testify, and certainly poets and novelists have led the charge into the past in works from Toni Morrisonâs Beloved and Octavia Butlerâs Kindred to Claudia Rankineâs Citizen: An American Lyric and Colson Whiteheadâs Underground Railroad. Along with these and many other literary memorialsâfor such is their statusâmemorial sites in public space are sites of memory where history and memory converge; where memory becomes history and history becomes memory through the feelings that memorials inspire in their viewers. As the flaring passions surrounding monuments in 2017 demonstrate, public art flows in and out of our personal identities.
Moreover, the feelings that monuments inspire in viewers reflect the shape of the viewerâs knowledge (or ignorance) about the past. I therefore lead up to my analysis of memorials through a presentation of writing that incorporates memory traces as forms of affective knowledge . The first chapter, âIn Theory: Memory as an Affective Archive,â situates the book in the field of affect studies. I take as my starting point the âaffective turn â that twenty-first-century criticism has taken and the transdisciplinary cohort of social scientists and humanists that has formed around methodologies that incorporate feelings and physiology into intellectual inquiry. These writers build on the tradition of observation, analysis, and archival research in the course of forging new critical pathways through the lived, phenomenological experiences of reflection and memory; they also build on the work of Audre Lorde , bell hooks , Minnie Bruce Pratt , Gloria AnzaldĂča , and the many feminists who centralized bodies, feelings, and personal experience in their theoretical writing. Affect theorists have forged a new research methodology that extends from the use of emotional and embodied experience in theorizing social life, to the uses of memory as an archival source . To cite one example, Ann Cvetkovich demonstrates this method in her recent An Archive of Feelings and in a text I discuss at length, Depression: A Public Feeling . In the latter book, Cvetkovich draws on âacademic memoir â by embedding her own âDepression Journalsâ in her scholarly critique of the medicalization of depression . I look at this and other examples of academic memoir and journaling as scholarly sources in contemporary affect theory.
In Chapter 2, âMemoir and Memory-tracesâ I turn to memoir work that, like the work of affect theorists , engages the archive through affect. The âarchiveâ is an admittedly profuse concept and it means different things in different contexts. In an academic context, archival materials include most recorded and retrievable sources which, traditionally, have served as the basis for substantiating scholarship. As Derrida notes in Archive Fever , though, âthe archive takes place at the place of originary and structural breakdown of the said memoryâ (Derrida 11). The archive is thus entangled with memory by definition, as it poses as an externalized, disembodied form of cultural memory that the scholar can mine. As a property of memory, so too is the archive a property of history, and it is this form of archive that Caribbean writers Dionne Brand and Patrick Chamoiseau engage in works that span memoir and history. Brandâs memoir, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging , touches on the authorâs childhood in Trinidad and adulthood in Canada but is equally concerned with understanding and intervening in the larger histories amongst which Brand situates her identity. A lush work of memories, poetry, and criticism, the book presents vignettes from the authorâs life alongside her meditations on writing, history, mapmaking, and most importantly for this chapter, the archives . Brandâs memoir is replete with supporting materials that range from fifteenth-century journals and letters to contemporary critical theory , from geograph...