Commemorating sojourner truth: Negotiating the politics of race and gender in the spaces of public memory

(In)Formal memoryscapes and the unma(s)king of a Malaysian war heroine

“…(: 856) remind us, ‘there is never simply one memory, nor is there only one way to remember’. Indeed, despite attempts to anoint one version of the past as the ‘right’ one, individuals with other perspectives may resist, thus potentially giving rise to ‘ideological battles over race, gender, and ‘what comes to stand as “truth”’ (Mandziuk, : 272). Competing claims to history do not only occur antagonistically.…”

“…An analysis of the private museum in Papan reveals too how this holds implications for nonstate efforts to mark aspects of the past rendered obscure within national historiography. In so doing, the paper provides a nuanced analysis of gendered representations of war memory in Malaysia, thus adding to geographical works on women heroines usually drawn from Euro‐American cases (Heffernan & Medlicott, ; Mandziuk, ; Pickles, ; Delyser, but see Muzaini & Yeoh, ). It shows how simplistic it is to attribute the confinement of women to edges of public memory as just the product of patriarchy.…”

When Memories and Discourses Collide: The President's House and Places of Public Memory

“…Third, while the centripetal collision of discourses and memories produces a blender-like effect in which different meanings and affective investments converge over time and among different groups (e.g., Bodnar, 1992;Browne, 1999;Lavrence, 2005;Mandziuk, 2003;Sturken, 1997), the force of the collision blows the metaphorical lid off the blender as the site becomes a centrifuge spewing discourses that do not ''stick'' into the rhetorical ether, where they continue to circulate and are occasionally pulled into other public controversies. As Schwartz and Bayma (1999) noted, for example, the building of the Korean War Memorial was motivated, in part, by ''resentment'' over the previously-constructed Vietnam Veterans Memorial (p. 952).…”

Reconstructing the Lost Cause in the Memphis City Parks Renaming Controversy

“…The rhetorical import of public memory when articulated through the materiality of (re)constructed and contested public spaces has won substantial attention from rhetorical scholars over the past two decades (Armada, 1998;Blair, 1999;Blair, Jeppeson, & Pucci, 1991;Blair & Michael, 1999Browne, 1999;Dickinson, 1997;Dickinson, Blair, & Ott, 2010;Dickinson, Ott, & Aoki, 2005;Gallagher, 1995Gallagher, , 1999Hasian, 2004;Hubbard & Hasian, 1998;Mandziuk, 2003;Trujillo, 1993). This study adds to the current literature by explicating how the narratives of discursive texts that formulate such monuments intervolve to construct and alter public perceptions of contested civic spaces through the latent mythic ideologies embedded within those narratives.…”