Realms of Memory

How can the past be turned against its memory keepers?  How can the successes and accomplishments of a person or movement be undone by intentionally misremembering and distorting the past?   University of Southern California sociologist Hajar Yazdiha argues that this is precisely what’s been happening with the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement.  Since the Reagan era the memory of this past has been used by diverse actors on the right to roll back the gains of the civil rights movement.  The memory of Dr. King has been exploited to further the goals of a wide array of conservative groups.  For more, listen to a conversation with Hajar Yazdiha about her book, The Struggle for the People’s King:  How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement.

From Latinos and women to the disabled and the LGBTQ community, a wide range of disadvantaged groups have achieved significant legal gains in the United States since the 1960s.  This minority rights revolution inevitably sparked a backlash among white conservatives who felt threatened by change.  In this fierce struggle over the values and character of the nation, University of Southern California sociologist Hajar Yazdiha argues that all sides have sought advantage by laying claim to the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement.  To learn more listen to Hajar Yazdiha discuss her recent book, The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement.  Next on the August 6th episode of Realms of Memory.

In the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd the toppling of scores of monuments to the Confederacy made national and international news.  But four years on the vast majority of these monuments remain firmly in place.  University of North Carolina at Charlotte historian and professor emerita Karen L. Cox spent much of her career studying the women responsible for building most of these monuments.  She decided to write No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice to help communities make informed decisions about what to do with this past.  Her work sheds much needed light on the reasons why these monuments were built, why they have been defended and preserved, and the long struggle to denounce and remove them. 

For communities to determine the fate of the hundreds of remaining monuments to the Confederacy they need to understand the context and purpose for which they were built.  University of North Carolina at Charlotte historian and professor emerita Karen L. Cox stresses that these monuments were erected to restore and perpetuate a system of white supremacy.  Situated in prominent public spaces, particularly outside courthouses, monuments to the Confederacy worked in tandem with Jim Crow laws and racial terror to create a system of white domination that lasted another hundred years after emancipation.  A conversation with Karen L. Cox about her book, No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice, coming July 2nd on Realms of Memory.  

As campaign season in the United States kicks into high gear the border has once again become a political football for both the right and left.  University of Texas at San Antonio historian Omar Valerio-Jiménez reminds us that these uses and abuses of the border typically rely on collective amnesia about the past.  In Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory and Citizenship, Valerio-Jiménez shines a much needed light on how the US-Mexico War created the southern border and what this has meant for Mexicans, from Texas to California, who became American citizens. In particular, he shows how the memory of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the war inspired generations of Mexican Americans to fight to achieve the unfulfilled promise of full citizenship rights. 

Fears of the border are reaching fever pitch in the lead up to the 2024 US presidential elections.  Much of the alarm hinges on the forgetting of the US-Mexico War (1846-1848).  University of Texas at San Antonio historian Omar Valerio-Jiménez reminds us that it was the United States that invaded and annexed half of Mexico.  In Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory and Citizenship, Valerio-Jiménez reveals how the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the war, and its unfulfilled promise of full citizenship rights, has never been forgotten by Mexican Americans. Since the mid-nineteenth century, memories of the US-Mexico War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo have inspired successive generations of Mexican Americans to fight for their civil rights.

Americans are living in an age of frenzied memorial making, argues University of Texas at Dallas art and cultural historian Erika Doss.  We saturate the public landscape with memorials to every conceivable cause, aggrieved group, or unsung hero.  What do memorials tell us about Americans and America today? In Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America, Erika Doss contends that memorials embody public emotions such as grief, fear, gratitude, shame and anger.  They help process tragic events like school shootings or terrorist attacks.  They allow us to express our gratitude for past sacrifices or shame for episodes that run counter to our shared values and ideals.  At their best, memorials allow for our participation in the process of memory making.  They can be powerfully therapeutic, encouraging conversations and engaged, critical thinking about the past.  At their worst, they can entrench us in our emotions, lock us into self-gratulatory modes of thought, or magnify our fears without helping us to understand the hows and whys of what we are memorializing.  

From the 9/11 to the Salem witch trials memorial, University of Texas at Dallas art historian Erika Doss argues that we are living in an age of memorial mania.  In her book Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America, Erika Doss explains how memorials embody and allow for the public expression of emotions such as grief, fear, gratitude, shame and anger.  What are the benefits and drawbacks of today’s memorial culture and what does it reveal about America and Americans?  Find out on the May 7th episode of Realms of Memory.  

It took nearly fifty years before a single dollar was spent on commemorating Emmett Till in the state of Mississippi where he was brutally murdered in August 1955.  Dave Tell, University of Kansas Professor and author of Remembering Emmett Till, argues that we can’t understand the remembering and forgetting of Emmett Till in the Mississippi Delta where he died without considering the natural and built environment.  From the Tallahatchie River where the fourteen-year-old boy’s body was sunk to Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market where the story was set in motion, the buildings and natural features of the Mississippi Delta have had a profound impact on memory of Emmett Till.  

In August 1955 Emmett Till was abducted from his uncle’s home, tortured, shot, bound by barbed wire to a cotton gin fan and sunk in the Tallahatchie River.  The outrage triggered by the photo of the mangled remains of the fourteen-year-old boy’s body in the open cassette at the funeral in Till’s native Chicago rallied many to the cause of the nascent civil rights movement.  University of Kansas Professor Dave Tell, author of Remembering Emmett Till, helps us understand the forces that broke the decades long silence in the Mississippi Delta where the murder took place.  The built and natural environment of the Delta, Tell argues, has had a profound influence on the memory and legacy of the murder.  For my full conversation with Dave Tell, tune into the April 2nd episode of Realms of Memory. 

Beginning in 1880s Africans Americans became the targets of a lynching craze that claimed thousands of lives.  In Beyond the Rope: The Impact of Lyching on Black Culture and Memory, University of Oklahoma historian Karlos K. Hill argues that narratives are key to understanding not just what drove the lynching craze but how African Americans responded.  It was the narrative of the black beast rapist that fueled and justified the lyching mania.  African American activists and cultural actors responded with their own victimization and consoling narrative to galvanize public support and to offer examples of courage and heroism to inspire future generations.  Victimization and consoling narratives were both examples of how African Americans found usable pasts to fight against racial violence and injustice.  

Dehumanizing narratives of black male bodies drove the lynching epidemic that claimed thousands of African American lives between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries.  Dr. Karlos K. Hill, author of Beyond the Rope: The Impact of Lynching on Black Culture and Memory, explains how African American political and cultural actors fought back against this reign of terror with their own humanizing and heroic narratives of lynched black bodies.  Remembering lynched black bodies in ways that encouraged empathy or instilled sentiments pride was a means of finding empowering usable pasts during one of the darkest chapters in American history.  

Cambodia has often been cast as a broken, amnesiac nation, unable to confront the memory of the horrors it experienced during the Khmer Rouge era.  How did these assumptions justify the establishment of transitional justice mechanisms such as the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC)?  In what ways were the therapeutic claims of the ECCC overblown and destined to disappoint?  How did the Cambodian government use the ECCC to support its own self-serving reading of the past?  What important memory work did NGOs take on that is often forgotten because of the tendency to focus exclusively on prominent institutions such as the ECCC?  To answer these questions and more listen to University of Bath sociologist Pete Manning, author of Transitional Justice and Memory in Cambodia: Beyond the Extraordinary Chambers.

Cambodia has often been cast as a broken, amnesiac nation, unable to confront the memory of the horrors it experienced during the Khmer Rouge era.  How did these assumptions justify the establishment of transitional justice mechanisms such as the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC)?  In what ways were the therapeutic claims of the ECCC overblown and destined to disappoint?  How did the Cambodian government use the ECCC to support its own self-serving reading of the past?  What important memory work did NGOs take on that is often forgotten because of the tendency to focus exclusively on prominent institutions such as the ECCC?  To answer these questions and more listen to the February 6th episode of the Realms of Memory podcast featuring Dr. Pete Manning, author of Transitional Justice and Memory in Cambodia: Beyond the Extraordinary Chambers.

The system of enforced prostitution by the Japanese military went unpunished and unexamined for decades after the Asia-Pacific War.  International recognition only began in 1991 when Korean survivor Kim Hak-sun spoke out in graphic detail about her dark past.  In Systemic Silencing: Activism, Memory, and Sexual Violence in Indonesia, University of Melbourne historian Kate McGregor tells the story of the transnational struggle for recognition and redress for and by the women of East and Southeast Asia.  Focusing on the less studied case of Indonesia, she points out how the sexual abuse and exploitation of Indonesian woman began during the Dutch colonial era.  She reveals how collaboration with the Japanese, sentiments of shame, and Cold War political and economic pressures favored the silencing of this past.