Uncertain Architecture: Transforming Normativity through the National Memorial for Peace and Justice

Abstract Drawing on the philosophies of Mbembe, Butler, Deleuze and Guattari, and a range of interdisciplinary authors, this article argues that history, which is the perceptual field through which our visions of the world are constructed, can actively hide or legitimize violence by creating fixed, borderized senses of identity. As part of this construction, architecture should, I contend, work to provoke unstable visions of the world: it should be “uncertain.” Through the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, I explore how the use of uncertain, bodily movement through space can resist grand narratives and uncritical histories. Through uncertainty, the memorial reconfigures the normative interpretive horizons we bring to our lived encounters to become less fixed and thereby less amenable to violence. Uncertain architecture offers an original way to think through the challenges of world-making in an increasingly compartmentalized and enclosed world.