Cultural Memory, Affect, and Countermonuments

Abstract

This chapter addresses to role of public monuments and their role in the cultural memory of slavery in the United States Through a comparative analysis of the memorialization of slavery in the United States versus the Caribbean, and a historical look at monuments and race in the United States, the chapter concludes with a close reading of Kara Walker’s 2014 monumental sugar sculpture, “A Subtlety.” A site-specific, temporary installation that no longer exists, the piece spoke to the dearth of monuments to the enslaved in the United States. By examining the sculpture’s status as a countermonument, I present a full account of its reception and the violently varied feelings of viewers—feelings that live on as an affective archive of the topics it introduced into public space.