Remembering Crispus Attucks: Race, rhetoric, and the politics of commemoration

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

“…Drawing upon the recent scholarship on public memory, this analysis of debates over the meaning of Truth's image reveals how campaigns to commemorate her enjoined three interrelated rhetorical themes in articulating how she should be remembered: location, character, and ownership. Similar to Browne's (1999) conclusion that the commemoration practice regarding Crispus Attucks was "transformed from its origins in traditions of African American resistance into an expression of official culture" (p. 169), Sojourner Truth's commemorations deplete the potential critique and radical message in her photographic and historical record to accommodate contemporary narratives of race relations, gender roles, and community values.…”

“…Notably, three contemporary public campaigns to memorialize Truth via statues erected in her image offer a significant discursive territory for exploring the rhetorical processes of public memory and the ways in which the commemoration of events or figures from the past mediates public values and contains markers of cultural clash over significant issues such as race and gender. As Browne (1999) argues in regard to the selective and interpretative nature of such memorializing, "when remembrance is organized into acts of ritual commemoration, it becomes identifiably rhetorical, thus a means to recreate symbolically a history otherwise distant and mute" (p. 169). Visualizing and locating Truth's material image are rhetorical processes dominated by figurations of Truth from among the extant fragments of her image and life, but also mediated by the demands of contemporary circumstances for particular meanings and resolutions.…”

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).…”

Burning Mississippi into Memory? Cinematic Amnesia as a Resource for Remembering Civil Rights

“…A variety of memory sites, including commemorative structures (Blair, Jeppeson, and Pucci, 1991;Blair and Michel, 2000;Bodnar, 1992;Ehrenhaus, 1989;Mandzuik, 2003), speeches (Browne 1993(Browne , 1999, museums (Gallagher, 1999), photographs (Zelizer, 1998), and films (Biesecker, 2002;Ehrenhaus, 2001;Hasian 2001;Hasian and Carlson, 2000;Owens, 2003) constitute rhetorical expressions of cultural knowledge and values about past events. Indeed, widely shared depictions of the past may tell us more about contemporary issues than they do about past events.…”