Commemorative (Dis)Placement: On the Limits of Textual Adaptability and the Future of Public Memory Scholarship

Abstract:As Kirt Wilson recently noted, contemporary memory and commemorative scholarship can sometimes be too narrowly focused on the centrality of material visual display to a historical narrative's persuasive power or institutional ideological structures, a tendency that ultimately valorizes and reinforces dominant narratives. In the face of that practice, I ask: How can we understand the extent to which institutionalized histories reinforce and stabilize hegemonic ideals of systems and structures while (dis)placing others? There are several potential answers to this question; the one I want to focus on here has to do with methodological choices. More specifically, I argue for an expansion of the focus of memory and commemorative scholarship to incorporate nondominant historical narratives. This can be achieved by using a methodological approach rooted in circulation theory as a corrective to a long-term focus on dominant (hegemonic) texts. Such an approach allows for memory and commemorative scholarship to employ multiple discourses and practices embedded in commemoration by critically engaging the ways in which hegemonic narratives and identities emerge and are enacted beyond what are traditionally understood to be the "material" structures of public memory.