Power Play

Abstract

This essay examines how the rhetoric of recovery and reclamation functions in scholarly projects that aim to switch traditional or historical narrative codes. After describing the discourse on “post-blackness” as an example of how prefixes serve as problematic stabilizers in academe, I will offer a few moments in recent popular commemorative culture – especially the events that recognized desegregation at the University of Alabama – as narrative sites where the limitations of recovery work become apparent.