Abstract
This introductory chapter situates our work at the nexus of urban studies, critical rhetoric, political geography, and memory studies, and presents readers with a view on cities as agentic actors that traverse various memoryscapes for strategic uses in the present. Assembling human and non-human actors across dense cityscapes, we set up our analyses of “monument wars” in New York, Charlottesville, and Montgomery with a posthuman view on rhetoric, agency, and memory.
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Notes
- 1.
Kirk Savage, Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). For a journalist’s take on the Confederate variations of these monument wars see Rebecca Solnit, “The Monument Wars,” Harper’s Magazine, January, 2017, https://harpers.org/archive/2017/01/the-monument-wars/. See also Michelle D. Brock, Molly Michelmore and Sarah Horowitz, “Why Universities Should be on the Front Lines of the Monument Wars,” The Washington Post, last modified September 6, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/.
- 2.
Frank Bongiorno, “The Statue Wars,” Inside Story, last modified September 4, 2017, https://insidestory.org.au/the-statue-wars/; Tyler Stiem, “Statue Wars: What Should We Do with Troublesome Monuments,” The Guardian, last modified September 26, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/sep/26/statue-wars-what-should-we-do-with-troublesome-monuments; Sarah Vowell, “America’s Statue Wars are a Family Feud,” The New York Times, last modified November 16, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/16/opinion/sunday/confederate-statues-lee-family.html.
- 3.
Plans are already underway for the building of a memorial for those who lost their lives in the Charleston attack. Camila Domonoske, “Architect Unveils Design for Emanuel AME Church Memorial,” NPR, last modified July 16, 2018, https://www.npr.org/2018/07/16/629424811/architect-unveils-design-for-mother-emanuel-ame-church-memorial.
- 4.
See Julia Hollingsworth, “Christchurch Terror Attack Death Toll Increases to 51,” CNN, last updated May 2, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/02/asia/nz-christchurch-attack-death-toll-intl/index.html.
- 5.
Anti-Defamation League Staff, “White Supremacists Adopt New Slogan: ‘You Will Not Replace Us’,” Anti-Defamation League, last modified June 9, 2017, https://www.adl.org/blog/white-supremacists-adopt-new-slogan-you-will-not-replace-us.
- 6.
Patricia Davis, “Memoryscapes in Transition: Black History Museums, New South Narratives, and Urban Regeneration,” Southern Communication Journal 78, no. 2 (2013): 107–127.
- 7.
Southern Poverty Law Center Staff, “The Current State of Sanctuary Law,” Southern Poverty Law Center, last modified March 8, 2018, https://www.splcenter.org/20180308/current-state-sanctuary-law.
- 8.
Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Murder of Michael Brown: Reading the Ferguson Grand Jury Transcript,” Social Text 34, no. 1 (2016): 49–71; Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Kosa, “#Ferguson: Digital Protest, Hashtag Ethnography, and the Racial Politics of Social Media in the United States,” American Ethnologist 42, no. 1 (2018): 4–17.
- 9.
For more on the dingpolitik aspects of memoryscapes see Nicholas S. Paliewicz and Marouf A. Hasian, Jr., The Securitization of Memorial Space: Rhetoric and Public Memory (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019).
- 10.
Ash Amin, “Re-thinking the Urban Social,” City 11, no. 1 (2007): 107–108. See also Michael Acuto, “Seeing Like a City,” Social & Cultural Geography 18, no. 5 (2017): 732–733.
- 11.
Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 3.
- 12.
See Ljiljana Radonić, “From ‘Double Genocide’ to ’the New Jews’: Holocaust, Genocide and Mass Violence in Post-Communist Memorial Museums,” Journal of Genocide Research 20, no. 4 (November 2018): 510–529. For a much earlier critique that hinted at what was to come see Jonathan Freedland, “I See Why ‘Double Genocide’ Is a Term Lithuanians Want,” The Guardian, last modified September 14, 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/sep/14/double-genocide-‑lithuania-holocaust-communism.
- 13.
Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: University of Stanford Press, 2009).
- 14.
Bryan Cheyette, “Book Review: Double Monuments to the Rhetoric of Ruins,” Independent, last modified July 24, 1993, paragraph 1, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/book-review-double-monuments-to-the-rhetoric-of-ruins-the-texture-of-memory-james-e-young-yale-2750-1486841.html.
- 15.
Erika Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feelings in America (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2010).
- 16.
Jay Winter, “The Generation of Memory: Reflections on the ‘Memory Boom” in Contemporary Historical Studies,” Archives & Social Studies 1 (2017): 363–397.
- 17.
See Dan Hicks and Sarat Mallet, Lande: The Calais “Jungle” and Beyond (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2019).
- 18.
Amit Chaudhuri, “The Real Meaning of Rhodes Must Fall,” The Guardian, last modified March 16, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/mar/16/the-real-meaning-of-rhodes-must-fall.
- 19.
Savage, Monument Wars, 312.
- 20.
Kappler, “Saravejo’s Ambivalent Memoryscape,” 3.
- 21.
Kendall Phillips and G. Mitchell Reyes, “Surveying Global Memoryscapes: The Shifting Terrain of Public Memory Studies,” In Global Memoryscapes: Contesting Remembrance in a Transnational Age (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011), 1–26, 14.
- 22.
On the linkages that exist between cityscapes and Foucauldian “effective histories” see Ann L. Stoler, “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination,” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 2 (May 2008): 191–219.
- 23.
Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 39.
- 24.
Bruno Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public,” Bruno Latour.fr, 7, http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/downloads/96-MTP-DING.pdf.
- 25.
James E. Young, ‘The Counter-Monument: Memory Against Itself in Germany Today,” Critical Inquiry, 18, no. 2 (1992): 267–296. See also James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Noam Lupu, “Memory Vanished, Absent, and Confined: The Countermemorial Project in 1980s and 1990s Germany,” History and Memory 15, no. 2 (2003): 130–164.
- 26.
Robert Young, “Memory and Counter-Memory: The End of the Monument in Germany,” Harvard Design Magazine 9 (1999): 1–10, 3.
- 27.
Bruno Latour and Emilie Hermant, “Paris: Invisible City,” Bruno Latour.fr., n.d., 29–30. http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/downloads/viii_paris-city-gb.pdf.
- 28.
Ibid., 63–64, 67.
- 29.
Ibid., 1–77.
- 30.
Gerald E. Frug, “The City as a Legal Concept,” Harvard Law Review 93, no. 6 (April 1980): 1057–1154, 1062.
- 31.
Stefanie Kappler, “Sarejevo’s Ambivalent Memoryscape: Spatial Stories of Peace and Conflict,” Memory Studies 10, no. 2 (2017): 130–143.
- 32.
Ibid., 2.
- 33.
Ibid., 7.
- 34.
Stoler, Imperial Debris.
- 35.
Karen E. Till, “Wounded Cities: Memory-Work and a Place-Based Ethics of Care,” Political Geography 31, no. 1 (January 2012): 3–14.
- 36.
Ibid., 5.
- 37.
See William Langewiesche, “Welcome to the Green Zone,” The Atlantic, November 2004, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/11/welcome-to-the-green-zone/303547/; Falih Hassan and Rod Nordland, “Baghdad’s Fortified Green Zone Opens to Public After 15 Years,” The New York Times, last modified December 10, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/world/middleeast/green-zone-baghdad-open.html. The fascination with the “Green Zone” even inspired a Iraq war thriller by Paul Greengrass. See Alex von Tunzelmann, “Green Zone: A Surfeit of Sincerity,” The Guardian, last modified September 1, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2011/sep/01/green-zone-sincerity-reel-history.
- 38.
Steven Graham, Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (New York: Verso, 2010).
- 39.
9/11 Memorial & Museum Staff, “The 9/11 Memorial & Museum Ranked Top Museum in U.S.,” 911Memorial.org, last modified September 6, 2018, https://www.911memorial.org/blog/911-memorial-museum-ranked-top-museum-us.
- 40.
Madison Horne, “9/11 Lost and Found: The Items Left Behind,” History.com, last modified May 6, 2019, paragraphs 1, 3, https://www.history.com/news/9-11-artifacts-ground-zero-photos.
- 41.
See Jay D. Aronson, Who Owns the Dead? The Science and Politics of Death at Ground Zero (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).
- 42.
Richard C. Schragger, “When White Supremacists Invade a City,” Virginia Law Review no. 104 (January 2018): 58–73, 73.
- 43.
Ibid., 72.
- 44.
Ibid.
- 45.
Ibid., 73.
- 46.
J. Hillis Miller, “Derrida’s Politics of Autoimmunity,” Discourse 30, nos. 1 & 2 (Winter & Spring 2008): 208–225.
- 47.
See Roberto Esposito, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life (New York: Polity, 2011).
- 48.
BBC Staff, “Charlottesville Confederate Statutes Protected, Virginia Judge Rules,” BBC News, last modified May 1, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48125171.
- 49.
Jared Foretek, “Seeking Peace and Justice, Montgomery Plans a Lynching Memorial,” City Lab, last modified August 21, 2017, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/08/seeking-peace-and-justice-montgomery-plans-a-lynching-memorial/536637/.
- 50.
Campbell Robertson, “A Lynching Memorial is Opening. The Country Has Never Seen Anything Like It,” The New York Times, last modified April 25, 2018, paragraph 3, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/25/us/lynching-memorial-alabama.html.
- 51.
Equal Justice Initiative Staff, “Alabama Lawmakers Protect Confederate Memorials,” Equal Justice Initiative, last modified May 29, 2017, paragraphs 1–2, https://eji.org/news/alabama-lawmakers-protect-confederate-memorials.
- 52.
Ibid., paragraph 3.
- 53.
Ibid.
- 54.
Ibid.
- 55.
Southern Poverty Law Center Staff, “Weekend Read: Confederate Monuments Are Doing Down. Lynching Memorials Are Going Up,” Southern Poverty Law Center, last modified April 27, 2018, https://www.splcenter.org/news/2018/04/27/weekend-read-confederate-monuments-are-going-down-lynching-memorials-are-going.
- 56.
W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “Exclusion, Inclusion, and the Politics of Confederate Commemoration in the American South,” Politics, Groups, and Identities 6, no. 2 (2018): 324–330.
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Hasian, M.A., Paliewicz, N.S. (2020). Introduction: US Cities’ Agentic Role in Twenty-First-Century Memory and Monument Wars. In: Memory and Monument Wars in American Cities. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53771-5_1
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