Beschreibung:
This book explores how ephemeral and displaced public memories continue to linger and circulate around the National Mall in Washington, DC. Chapters examine unrecognized historical events on the Mall, selective interpretations of the past within the Mall’s sites, and places of public memory hiding in plain sight.
Rhetorics Haunting the National Mall: Displaced and Ephemeral Public Memories vividly illustrates that a nation’s history is more complicated than the simple binary of remembered/forgotten. Some parts of history, while not formally recognized within a commemorative landscape, haunt those landscapes by virtue of their ephemeral or displaced presence. Rather than being discretely contained within a formal sites, these memories remain public by lingering along the edges and within the crevices of commemorative landscapes. By integrating theories of haunting, place, and public memory, this collection demonstrates that the National Mall, often referred to as “the nation’s front yard,” might better be understood as “the nation’s attic” because it hides those issues we do not want to address but cannot dismiss. The neatly ordered installations and landscaping of the National Mall, if one looks and listens closely, reveal the messiness of US history. From the ephemeral memories of protests on the Mall to the displaced but persistent presences of inequality, each chapter in this book examines the ways in which contemporary public life in the US is haunted by incomplete efforts to close the book on the past.
Acknowledgments
I. Introduction
Chapter 1. Haunting, Public Memories, and the National Mall
Roger C. Aden
II. Affective Presences of Ephemeral Memories
Chapter 2. Invoking the Spirits: A Rhetorical Séance
Aaron Hess, A. Cheree Carlson, and Carlos Flores
Chapter 3. Before the National Mall: Coxey’s Army and the Precedent for Public Protest
Sean Luechtefeld
Chapter 4. The Bonus Army March of 1932: Uneasy Legacies of Protest, Dissent, and Violence in American Memory
Roger C. Aden and Kenneth E. Foote
Chapter 5. The “Unmarked and Unremarked” Memories of the National Mall: Resurrection City and the Unreconciled History of the Civil Rights Movement as Radical Place-Making
Ethan Bottone, Derek H. Alderman, and Joshua Inwood
III. Faint Traces of Deflected Memories
Chapter 6. Haunting Dreams: Time and Affect in the Neoliberal Commemoration of “I Have a Dream”
Michael P. Vicaro
Chapter 7. The Haunting of “Forgotten” Places: Nineteenth Century Slave-Pens on the National Mall
Elizabethada A. Wright
Chapter 8. The Portrait Monument’s Emblematic and Tortured History
Teresa Bergman
Chapter 9. Which Souls Shall Haunt Us? Competing Genocidal Memoryscapes and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Selective Colonial Memorializations
Marouf Hasian Jr. and Stephanie Marek Muller
Chapter 10. Oft’ Remembered, Oft’ Forgotten: Remembering James Garfield
Theodore F. Sheckels
Chapter 11. The National Gallery of Art: Remembering the Haunting Voices of the Ghosts
Carl T. Hyden
IV. Conclusion
Chapter 12. Confronting the Ghosts in the National Attic
Roger C. Aden
Index
About the Editor
About the Contributors