University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Lapses in memory: slavery memorials and historical amnesia in the United States

(USC Thesis Other)

Lapses in memory: slavery memorials and historical amnesia in the United States

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content LAPSES IN MEMORY: SLAVERY MEMORIALS
AND HISTORICAL AMNESIA IN THE UNITED STATES

by

Tiffany Elizabeth Barber
________________________________________________________________________

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC, ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES

May 2008

Copyright 2008 Tiffany Elizabeth Barber

ii
Acknowledgements
Firstly, I would like to thank my loved ones for their generous and unconditional
encouragement. I would also like to acknowledge the members of my advisory
committee for their invaluable guidance, expertise, and investment in challenging me to
specify my argument and to craft each word of this text carefully. To Lauri Firstenberg,
Ph.D. for her extensive knowledge of contemporary art history and theory. To Herman
Gray, Ph.D. for lending me his critical lens and interdisciplinary insight. To Joshua
Decter, the Director of the Public Art Studies Program, for his intrigue, his criticisms, and
his confidence. And to Ruth Weisberg, Dean of the Roski School of Fine Arts at the
University of Southern California, for her support and assistance in my research
endeavors.

iii
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ii
Abstract iv
I. Re-membering Slavery: Recovery, Representation, and Redress
Introduction 1
Selective Bids: Memory, Cultural Trauma, and Plural Histories 3

II. Constructing and Preserving Nationhood: Monuments and Memorials 11

III. Locating the Void 17

IV. Bypassing the Trauma of Slavery
Monumental Substitutes 22
The Incapacities of Sculpture, Reconstruction, and The Freedmen’s Memorial 23

V. Re-reading, Re-telling, and Re-writing the Crisis of Slavery 29
Responses and Strategies 30
Conclusion 35

Bibliography 38

iv
Abstract
The monuments and memorials scattered across a nation’s landscape create permanent
records of place and time. These permanent records particularize history and memory.
The atrocities of war, genocide, apartheid and slavery form a historical category of
cultural trauma that exists as part of a country’s individual and collective narratives,
subsequently complicating memory and memorialization. This thesis locates slavery
memorials as a typology of public commemoration. In doing so, it highlights the
historical amnesia facilitated by a lack of official commissions representative of the
trauma of slavery in the United States. This analysis also explores the existing
scholarship on nationhood, cultural trauma, memory, and identifies potential strategies
for reconciling a nation’s traumatic past vis-à-vis public commemorations. Finally, this
research examines the public art genre of monuments and memorials as a coping
mechanism for traumatized communities.

1
I. Re-membering Slavery: Recovery, Representation, and Redress

Introduction
In 19
th
century America, a war was brewing. The Union and the Confederacy
were entrenched in their state interests, the institution of chattel slavery was in jeopardy,
and the national identity as a beacon of progress and democracy was at stake. In 1865,
President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, a contested
reconciliatory gesture, to end the Civil War and to restore the nation to its once
egalitarian glory. This attempted suture is where my argument is situated. Broadly, this
paper will identify the intersections of memory and history along with the conditional
social relations and struggles for power that accompany both. This paper identifies the
tensions between culture, cultural production, language, meaning, and symbols, and
teases out how imagined communities, nations, and societies arrive at and are produced
through representation. Specifically, this analysis investigates how dominant ideologies,
grand narratives of statehood and nationhood, and power regimes
1
are each constituted
through linguistic codes, memory, and visual imaging.
2
In this paper, these terms and
concepts are brought to bear in the public domain through an investigation into the
presence and absence of federal commemorations to slavery in the United States,
particularly in the vein of public monuments and memorials.

1
These terms are culled from the discourse developed by postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault. See
Foucault’s Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (New York: Pantheon,
1980) and The History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasure (Vintage, 1990).

2
For these concepts, I turn primarily to Toni Morrison, Andreas Huyssen, and Kirk Savage. Morrison is a
celebrated American novelist and literary critic; Huyssen is the Villard Professor of German and
Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His research is centered around German Studies,
postmodernism, memory and cultural trauma in transnational contexts; Savage is an art historian who has
done extensive work on genres of memorials and monuments related to historical trauma.
2
Additionally, this study explores how the modern foundational principles of
progress and liberty in the United States are upset and displaced by a legacy of racial
injustice and chattel bondage. Since its independence, both the national identity and
imagination of the United States have been enamored with the future, and as scholar and
art historian Kirk Savage contends, “the dominant notion of [American] history has been
that of a people dedicated to progress.”
3
Within this context, it is difficult to both identify
and recover the past but also to understand the past’s rippling impact on the present and
the future. This inquiry takes up notions of historical memory relative to the legacy of
America’s imperialist past by examining the tradition of memorials and monuments – the
conventional markers of memory comprising a public imaginary. This paper analyzes
public monuments and memorials to Abraham Lincoln as emblems of liberty and
progress and examines the performative role of the figure of Lincoln in terms of the
trauma of slavery in the public imaginary of the United States. I propose that there is void
in the American landscape in terms of slavery memorials. How can such a void be
identified? How can absence be visualized? This is the scene of problematics for this
analysis.
Finally, this examination will explore the possibility of memorialization as
productive or discursive in the context of the monument and the memorial in the 19
th
and
20
th
centuries. Monuments and memorials, the physical inscriptions in a national
landscape, project a privileged history and narrative. These projections are productive in
that they reflect the images of these histories and narratives, thus literalizing systems of
power and reinforcing the strongholds of power that are constituted by such productivity.

3
Kirk Savage, “The Past in the Present: The Life of Memorials,” Harvard Design Magazine 9 (Fall 1999):
2, http://gsd.harvard.edu/research/publications/hdm/back/9savage.html.
3
In the United States, this history and narrative are one of progress and modernity, thereby
producing conditions of impossibility in terms of memorializing the cultural trauma of
slavery. As Savage points out, public monuments within the American context help to
“celebrate and cement [a] progressive narrative of national history,”
4
further disclosing
the discursive work of memorialization. This analysis is not just a commentary about
what is absent, but also a way of thinking about the subject and the nation that is being
made and produced through the engagement (or the absence of such an opportunity for
engagement) with slavery and the past in the United States landscape.

Selective Bids: Memory, Cultural Trauma, And Plural Histories
Memory is the storage, retention, and recollection of information and past
experiences. A curious and elusive creature that totters between fact and myth, it has long
been the focus of innumerable enquiries, exhibitions, and experiments. Memory
materializes in the form of monuments and memorials scattered across the cultural
landscape of a country. The status and form of memory is deposited and retained in the
shared public space wherein monuments and memorials are constructed. In her article
“The Wall, the Screen, and the Image: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial,” memory
scholar and cultural historian Marita Sturken describes the interrelations of memory and
the physical forms of remembrance within social and cultural landscapes. Sturken asserts,
“The forms remembrance takes indicate the status of memory within a given culture.”
5

And as Huyssen reiterates, “The place of memory in any culture is defined by an

4
Savage, “The Past in the Present: The Life of Memorials,” 2.

5
Marita Sturken, “The Wall, the Screen, and the Image: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial,”
Representations 35, Special Issue: Monumental Stories (1991): 118.
4
extraordinarily complex discursive web of ritual and mythic, historical, political, and
psychological factors.”
6
Countries, cultures, and constituencies frequently attempt to
define the parameters of their respective collective identities with cultural signifiers like
monuments and memorials. These cultural definitions yield to contest under the
spatiotemporal constraints inherent in the development of histories and identities. This
contestability arises when the politics of memory and the politics of representation are
made more complex by crimes against humanity.
Atrocities such as war, genocide, apartheid and other forms of political violence
complicate the process of public remembrance as critical components of a historical
category of cultural trauma that exists as part of a country’s individual and collective
narratives, which are the origin myths and evolving accounts of how nations are made,
remade, and sustained. Since the emergence of postmodern societies in the 1980s, there
has been a surge of scholarship concerning the tensions between individual and
collective, official and unofficial, and personal and cultural narratives in history and
memory. If “cultural memory represents the many shifting histories and shared memories
that exist between a sanctioned narrative of history and personal memory,”
7
as Marita
Sturken writes, then inaccurate depictions or misreadings of history in the context of
cultural trauma invite further investigation into this rift between official and unofficial
testimonies. The sanctioned narrative that Sturken writes of is informed by an official
history that is written into, included, and retold in the national imaginary, and the

6
Andreas Huyssen, “Monument and Memory in a Postmodern Age,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 6, 2
(1993): 250.

7
Sturken 119.
5
symbiosis of cultural memory offers the possibility of redressing incomplete
constructions of such official narratives.
The scholarship concerning memory such as cultural trauma, collective and
cultural memory, reconciliation of the past, and exposition of truth first emerged in the
writings of Maurice Halbwachs, the French philosopher and sociologist, and later in the
work of Jan Assman and Pierre Nora.
8
In his seminal works Les Cadres Sociaux de la
Mémoire
9
and La Mémoire Collective,
10
Halbwachs analyzed the social context of
individual remembering and forgetting.
11
The analysis of remembering and forgetting
resurfaces in contemporary critical discourse on the relationship between past and
present. These terms have been brought to bear in recent years by contemporary art and
cultural historians and critics such as Paul Connerton, Marita Sturken, James E. Young,
Rory Bester, and Okwui Enwezor.
12
A country’s reconciliation of its past and the
exposition of truth in relation to admonition for injustice, reparations, and collective
healing have become momentous instrumental in confronting cultural trauma. The global
treatment of the Holocaust, America’s treatment of the Vietnam War as Sturken and
Young demonstrate respectively, and even more recently in South Africa’s treatment of

8
Maurice Halbwachs was influenced by fellow French sociologist Émile Durkheim.

9
English Translation: The Social Frameworks of Memory

10
English Translation: The Collective Memory

11
Barry Schwartz, “The Social Context of Commemoration: A Study in Collective Memory,” Social
Forces 61, 2 (December 1982): 375.

12
Connerton is a memory studies scholar and author of How Societies Remember (Cambridge University
Press, 1989); Bester is a curator and art critic; Enwezor was the Artistic Director of Documenta 11 (2002)
and founding publisher of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art.
6
apartheid as Bester and Enwezor attest, amplify the roles of memory, monuments, and
memorials and the need to incessantly interrogate and negotiate these historical ruptures.
The historical rupture of slavery in the United States has garnered significant
consideration relative to the memory and representation of this culturally traumatic
chapter of American history. The trauma of slavery puzzles the acts of remembering and
forgetting and problematizes the fetters of representation because of its unfathomable
savagery. The crisis in representation in terms of slavery is suspended in the fissures of
Emancipation and the Civil War. In his essay The Politics of Memory: Black
Emancipation and the Civil War Monument, Kirk Savage illuminates the political climate
of 19
th
century America. He writes that the “nation was at a turning point, propelled
almost despite itself by the trauma of the [Civil] war and the war’s most unexpected
result: the emancipation of four million slaves of African descent. The question of chattel
slavery, which had precipitated the war, was in turn settled by it, but the question of what
this nation had become without slavery remained, and still remains, unsettled.”
13
In
addition to the cohort of scholars and critics that have contributed to the discourse around
the impossibilities of the Civil War, chattel slavery, and preserving the American national
identity, a host of contemporary artists, namely Fred Wilson, Sam Durant, and Kara
Walker, have taken up the unsettling question to which Kirk Savage refers. The tactics
and interventions of these artists will be discussed later in this thesis, but it is important to
note that there have been a number of cultural producers and visual artists who have
responded to the crisis in representation that slavery poses.

13
Kirk Savage, “The Politics of Memory: Black Emancipation and the Civil War Monument,” in
Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity ed. by John R. Gillis (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1994): 127.
7
Along with introducing conceptions of collective memory, Maurice Halbwachs
argued, “that if part of the past is forgotten, it is because of the disappearance of the
groups which sponsored the corresponding memories.”
14
In the context of the trauma of
slavery, indeed slaves bound by chains, labor, and dislocation have been liberated, but the
collective memories have not been represented in the public domain. These collective,
unofficial memories have been muted and re-membered in the interest of a singular
history that favors the celebratory moment of Emancipation over the terror and trauma of
slavery. Critics Rory Bester and Katarina Pierre note in their discussion of visual art
practices in post-apartheid South Africa, “The absences in collective consciousness are
often more about silences than voids. They are spaces of quiet, not emptiness, waiting to
be voiced.”
15
Contrastingly, the absences in the American collective consciousness are
about voids that perpetuate silence. These spaces are alive and presumably present within
the cloaks of triumphant narratives, however they are speaking a narrated history that
valorizes victory and triumph rather than effectively giving a voice to the mammoth
afflictions of slavery’s struggle, pain, and loss.
The United States national narrative is inscribed with a legacy of violence, power,
and dominance, and its landscape reflects the country’s countless conquests as evidenced
by the collection of war monuments and memorials dedicated to battles fought in
Revolutionary, Civil and World Wars. Monuments and memorials, especially those that
commemorate untimely, unjustified, or inhumane deaths, are unwelcome; they are absent
from the national archive of public commemorations. In a critical study titled Standing

14
Schwartz 375.

15
Rory Bester and Katarina Pierre, Democracy’s Images: Photography and visual art after apartheid
(Umea, Sweden: BildMuseet, 1998): 16.
8
Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America
that implicates Western sculpture as an accomplice in the battles over power relations,
dominant knowledge, race, and representation, University of Pittsburgh’s Associate
Professor of Art History Kirk Savage illustrates how monuments puzzle the act of
remembering and forgetting by suturing memory to official history:
Public monuments . . . are meant to last, unchanged, forever . . . the monument is
supposed to remain a fixed point, stabilizing both the physical and the cognitive
landscape. Monuments attempt to mold a landscape of collective memory, to
conserve what is worth remembering and discard the rest.
16

In 19
th
century America, Savage continues, “Slavery could hardly even be acknowledged
in public space without exploding the myth of a democratically unified people from the
very outset.”
17
As Savage describes, with the onslaught of struggles around slavery, the
American democratic myth was exploded and the country’s selective denial of a nation
founded on racial injustice extended from its past into the present, specifically through
memorialization.
Social philosopher and scholar Lolle Nauta writes, “A liberal democratic society
that refuses to recognize its problematic past discriminates against the social groups that
carry this unrecognized past around with them.”
18
This statement bears considerable
weight in the historical context of the Reconstruction period in the United States, as there
were nominal representations of blacks in the public sphere. Kirk Savage writes, “Before
1860 there are no known images whatsoever of African Americans, slave or free, in

16
Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century
America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997): 4.

17
Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 5.

18
Lolle Nauta, “The Democratization of Memory,” Experiments with Truth: Translational Justice and the
Processes of Truth and Reconciliation: Documenta 11_Platform 2, ed. Okwui Enwezor and others
(Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz; New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002): 338.
9
marble or bronze.”
19
According to Savage, the black slave subject was unfit for
representation because of racist ideologies and this condition of impossibility collapsed
the narrative of slavery into a narrative of emancipation. In his article titled “Past in the
Present: The Life of Memorials,” Kirk Savage highlights how the struggle for freedom
during the 19
th
century was collapsed into a singular milestone, President Abraham
Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.
20
Savage also exposes the
discursive function of memorialization and commemoration, particularly within the
context of Lincoln as a national emblem of progress. He writes, “Memorials to heroes
and events were not meant to revive old struggles and debates but to put them to rest – to
show how great men and their deeds had made the nation better and stronger . . .
Commemoration was a process of condensing the moral lessons of history and fixing
them in place for all time.”
21
Consequently, there are a handful of official
commemorations, for instance The Freedmen’s Memorial to Abraham Lincoln, sprinkled
throughout America’s memorial and monumental landscape that preserve the image of
the enslaver and the emancipator as a celebratory detour around the impossibilities of
slavery, thereby reinforcing the cultural hegemony perpetuated by missing
representations of the trauma of slavery.
Memory, cultural trauma, nationhood, and the language of public monuments and
memorials are all complicated by the impossibility of slavery. Slavery disturbs the
national identity of the United States and calls for an investigation into the complexities

19
Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 16.

20
Savage, “The Past in the Present: The Life of Memorials,” 2.

21
Savage, “The Past in the Present: The Life of Memorials,” 2.
10
of memory and the discursive work of memorialization. By framing this investigation
through the trauma of slavery, I endeavor to trouble constructions of the nation, to
challenge the language that is consumed and written into official historical narratives, and
to query the representations of slavery in the public domain.

11
II. Constructing and Preserving Nationhood: Monuments and Memorials
Monuments and memorials connote fixity, they endure as physical emblems
within a historical landscape, and they represent the cultural expression of national
embodiment. As markers of time, place, culture, memory, and history, monuments and
memorials define and reflect a nation’s identity, in turn problematizing the act of
remembering as well as participating in the discursive production and management of this
national identity. The language of monuments and memorials confines and stagnates the
possibility of remembering traumatic events. Curator and critic Okwui Enwezor
expresses the impossibility of representation and language as it relates to the history of
the Holocaust in a brief analysis of Paul Celan’s Death Fugue. He writes, “. . . the poem’s
great strength is in describing with such economy and precision the impossibility of
language to fully encounter and account for what clearly still remains a singular act of
incomprehensible savagery.”
22
The reduction and exactitude referenced here in exposing
the limitations of representation to convey the trauma of torture and genocide can serve
as a point of departure in examining the inability of monuments and memorials to
facilitate processes of remembrance and to embody a traumatic past. Noted cultural
theorist and historian Andreas Huyssen offers another point of entry into the discussion
around the limits of representation in terms monuments, memorials, and cultural trauma.
In his analysis of the “intractable problems to any project of memorial representation”
that the Holocaust poses, he describes the tradition of the monument as object as that of
legitimating, identity-nurturing, heroic celebration and figure of triumph.
23
The trauma of

22
Okwui Enwezor, "Remembrance of Things Past: Memory and the Archive," in Democracy's Images:
Photography and Visual Art after Apartheid (Umea, Sweden: BildMuseet, 1998): 23.

12
slavery shares a similar struggle that the trauma of the Holocaust expresses against the
limits of representation, thereby challenging the language of traditional literal
monuments.
Monuments and memorials are the respondent compositions reflective of the
conflict and conquest that bolster national narratives. These are the stories of how nations
are made and formed, the origin myths, and the adopted histories that are often licensed,
packaged, and passed on as truth.
24
In modern societies, monuments and memorials are
often charged with preserving memory and meaning, thereby producing a national
identity that is aligned with official history. They are material markers inscribing a
nation’s landscape and archive. Monuments and memorials, used to publicly
commemorate historical milestones like wartime victories and defeats or “lives sacrificed
for a particular set of values,”
25
are the tangible keepsakes enshrining a nation’s history.
As South African essayist and playwright Jane Taylor declares in her consideration of the
archive, “Who we are is manifest through what (or whom) we possess”
26
and public
commemorations are “the symbolic representation”
27
of this patented identity. The ‘what’
possessed as a nation is pride and triumph; the ‘whom’ possessed are those sacrificed in
the name of this pride and triumph. Within this contested terrain and charged territory of

23
Huyssen, “Monument and Memory in a Postmodern Age,” 258.

24
For a more in depth discussion of the construction of nationhood, the public sphere and official history,
see Lauren Berlant’s The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).

25
Sturken 120.

26
Jane Taylor, “Holdings: Refiguring the Archive” in Refiguring the Archive, ed. Carolyn Williams and
others (Cape Town: David Philip Publishers, 2002).

27
Ibid.
13
concretizing history and memory in the public domain, it can be seen how monuments
and memorials personify memory.
Monuments, memorials, national narratives and identities comprise a nation’s
archive – the representational record of documents, symbols, and artifacts that illustrate
history. As national narratives mature and as the complexities of memory continue to
complicate these narratives, traditional monuments and memorials can be deemed
dysfunctional due to their static nature. Because of the stabilizing work that monuments
and memorials primarily perform, these typologies do not hold up under the cultural,
historical, temporal and spatial shifts that occur in the public domain. Andreas Huyssen
addresses the symbolic role of monuments and memorials in organizing memory in his
article “Monument and Memory in a Postmodern Age.” He states, “A society’s memory
is negotiated in the social body’s beliefs and values, rituals and institutions, and in the
case of modern societies in particular, it is shaped by such public sites of memory as the
museum, the memorial, the monument.”
28
Huyssen explains how mnemonic devices like
monuments and memorials create permanent records of place and time, particularizing
history and memory. Within this context, we can see how memorialization acts as an
institution for organizing social memory and thereby produces a particular account of the
liberal subject and nation in the public imaginary of the United States.
Official memory is hermetically bound by singular histories that omit the
unauthorized, the communal, and the popular. Official memory, or memory that is
reflective of a franchised history, gets parceled and recorded and is often devoid of
collective or cultural inflections. Subsequently, national narratives and archives are

28
Huyssen, “Monument and Memory in a Postmodern Age,” 249.
14
incomplete. Therefore, official commemorative projects perform in the interest of
upholding a singular history most often fixed to political agendas in the name of
preserving state and nation, thus framing the process through which the constitutive
function of monuments and memorials is carried out. Cultural, social and political
practices in imagining nationhood reflect a singular history that is troubled by the work of
plural histories and emergent memory discourses in exposing power relations within such
constructions. As historian and theorist Anthony Smith contends, “‘no memory, no
identity; no identity, no nation’,”
29
thus illustrating the complex articulations of identity,
memory, and nationhood. And as Andreas Huyssen, who leans on Freudian, Nietzschian,
and Adornian theories concerning the complexities of memory, reminds us, memory is
complicated by acts of remembering and forgetting, by denial and trauma and memory
often “serves the need to rationalize and to maintain power.”
30
Smith and Huyssen
highlight the linkages between national, communal, and personal identities and memories
and how power structures and the public imagination inform these identities and
memories. This exposition is made more complex by the discursive function of
monuments and memorials in managing a national identity. The conditions of
impossibility of the trauma of slavery serve as a touchstone for grappling with memory,
national narratives, and power relations. This study into public representations of the
trauma of slavery is not only a question of the recovery and reconciliation of a repressed
history. It is also related to the disruptive potential that slavery possesses to trouble

29
Anthony Smith, “Memory and Modernity: Reflections on Ernest Gellner’s Theory of Nationalism,” in
Nations and Nationalism 2, 3 (1996) quoted in Duncan Bell’s Memory, Trauma and World Politics:
Reflections on the Relationship Between Past and Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006): 383.

30
Huyssen, “Monument and Memory in a Postmodern Age,” 249.
15
normative conceptions of an inherent inferiority attached to blackness and difference as
well as normative conceptions around the inclusionary and regulatory rhetoric of
liberalism that informs the contemporary discourse around race, identity, dominance and
nationhood in the public domain and imaginary of the United States of America.
There seems to be a void in the memorial and monumental landscape of the
United States. The United States’ lack of accountability and resistance to publicly
remember and represent the country’s slave past produces a climate of amnesia, as
evidenced by decades of controversy and legislative debacles surrounding public
apologies, reparations, and other federal commemorative projects. Testimonials of
America’s slave past are underrepresented publicly in the United States.
31
This
investigation attempts to question the problematics of representation and memorialization
of the trauma of slavery in the public domain. In the context of this discussion, it is
necessary to examine cultural and collective memory relative to the re-construction and
redressing of history. Because of the country’s denial towards its origins as a slave
society as evidenced by tensions around remembering slavery and the pervasion of

31
I contend that various monuments and memorials to the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, Emancipation, and
the Civil Rights Movement act as proxies to slavery memorials. In terms of the public sphere and its
varying dimensions, I would also like to acknowledge here that American cinema and television,
particularly in response to the legacy of minstrelsy and such translations as The Amos and Andy Show, have
attempted to represent the traumatic legacy of slavery. For instance, Alex Haley’s 1970s mini-series Roots
and the graphic imagery that circulated in mainstream television had a profound impact in terms of
historical intervention and forms of memorialization that trouble a collective consciousness about slavery in
the United States. However, my argument concerning memorialization is not to discount the work of
popular culture in the national imagination, but to point out an absence in concrete forms and also to
trouble the productivity and consumption of such visual language. Many critics have positioned popular
culture as a site where the management of difference occurs and progresses an assimilationist, regulatory,
or tolerant narrative. Furthermore, popular culture since the 1960s, particularly television and film, as
components of the public domain, have offered representations of slavery that align with my argument, i.e.
Roots, Amistad, Beloved. However, there have been a number of criticisms around these representations as
iconic, reconciliatory, domesticating and complicit in a liberalist ideology of inclusion and harmony. See
Herman Gray’s Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2004) and Wendy Brown’s Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and
Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
16
racism, coupled with the failure to address this history by traditional means of memorial
sculpture, the history of chattel slavery has been diminished from the public imaginary.
This paper addresses the complexities of the United States’ national narrative wherein a
key and formative series of historical events relative to slavery is not aptly recognized
through the production of public memorials and monuments.

17
III. Locating the Void

Rather than talk of what we ‘know’ about slavery . . . we must talk of what we are
prevented from knowing, what we can never know, and how it is figured for us in
the partial access we do have.
32

In contemporary global society, what we know about slavery is frequently figured for us
in what Andreas Huyssen terms “media of critical cultural memory,”
33
strategic
omissions from official memory and history are responsible for what we are prevented
from knowing about slavery, and lapses in the memorial landscape are the partial access
wherein this figuring of slavery occurs. These tactics are inextricably linked to the state,
the “political proper.”
34
As literary critic Saidiya Hartman reveals, the slave as subject in
19
th
century America was “excluded from the locus of the ‘political proper’”
35
and
“traditional notions of the political and its central features: the unencumbered self, the
citizen, the self-possessed individual, and the volitional and autonomous subject.”
36
This
exclusion contributes to slavery’s condition of impossibility in terms of recovery,
representation, and redress, making the warrants for a lack of official commemorations
more legible. Kirk Savage reiterates that black Americans were excluded “from the
legitimate arenas of cultural representation.”
37
Official commissions to commemorate the

32
W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1994): 190.

33
Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Palo Alto: Stanford
University Press, 2003): 6.

34
Based on Michel De Certeau’s discussion of tactic in The Practices of Everyday Life (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984): 38 quoted in Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection: Terror,
Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997): 61.

35
Ibid.

36
Ibid.

37
Savage, “The Politics of Memory: Black Emancipation and the Civil War Monument,” 135.
18
trauma of slavery in the public sphere are missing, not just because of its horridness but
also because of the impossibilities of the language of representation within
commemorative practice. Consequently, as Toni Morrison suggests through her
investigation of the American literary imagination, slavery has been figured in the
national imaginary through the privileged presence of ‘whiteness’ and through a
deliberate absence of ‘blackness.’
Renowned author and literary critic Toni Morrison’s seminal study titled Playing
in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination surveys the imagining of binary
constructions of whiteness and blackness in American canonical literature. Morrison is
specifically interested in a whiteness predicated upon an absent or invisible blackness,
and she offers a way of thinking about the imaginative artifices of power knowledge and
cultural hegemony rhetorically, publicly, and nationally. Morrison’s critique of “the
validity and vulnerability of a certain set of assumptions conventionally accepted among
literary historians and critics and circulated as ‘knowledge’”
38
can be translated to assess
the constructions that get made and remade in the nation’s archive of public
commemorations. The constructed landscape mirrors the constructed master narrative of
progress in the United States in that the lack of slavery memorials as official federal
commemorative projects signifies a particular construction of history, a singular power
that excludes, represses, constitutes, and marginalizes. Monuments and memorials to
slavery, namely Civil War and post-Emancipation monuments along with abundant
commemorations to Abraham Lincoln, reflect Morrison’s argument that “American

38
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1992): 4.
19
literature has clearly been the preserve of white male views, genius, and power.”
39

Following Morrison, we can map her claims concerning the American literary
imagination onto the American public imagination. The memorialized image of Lincoln
stands in as a substitute for addressing the disruptive possibility of the trauma of slavery,
thereby inscribing the American landscape with a legacy of liberty and progress rather
than a history of dominance and injustice. Lincoln performs not only as the Great
Emancipator but also as an emblematic patch for the rupture of slavery in 19
th
century
America.
Morrison additionally points toward perpetual absences that occur in the
American literary imaginary that can also translate to the national and public imaginaries:
Just as the formation of the nation necessitated coded language and purposeful
restriction to deal with the racial disingenuousness and moral frailty at its heart, so
too did the literature, reproduce the necessity for codes and restrictions. Through
significant and underscored omissions, startling contradictions, heavily nuanced
conflicts, through the way writers peopled their work the signs and bodies of this
presence---one can see that a real or fabricated Africanist presence was crucial to
their sense of Americanness.
40

These linguistic codes produced the meaning of a fabricated Africanist presence, a
constructed blackness, and buttressed a national, white, American sensibility that
overwhelmed the national imaginary. Whiteness was the positive prescription to
blackness whose constructed identity was sutured to liberty, progress, and citizenship.
This oppositional othering originates in the master-slave narrative of racial slavery.
Saidiya Hartman notes, “The slave is the object or the ground that makes possible the
existence of the bourgeois subject and, by negation or contradistinction, defines liberty,

39
Morrison 5.

40
Morrison 6.
20
citizenship, and the enclosures of the social body.”
41
Because of this contrived
positionality, “the meaning and the guarantee of (white) equality depended upon the
presence of slaves.”
42
These techniques of constructedness and othering expose the
United States’ complicity in creating and producing subjects, particularly how the black
slave subject is remembered, and following Hartman, demonstrates the conditions of
impossibility that slavery inhabits in terms of representation.
With an absence of slavery memorials, it would appear that the United States has
diminished its history, and with the Emancipation Proclamation and the Union North’s
triumph in the Civil War tucked away in the nation’s archive of official documents and
facts as celebratory triumphs over racial injustice, has declared slavery finished. Kirk
Savage argues in his 1999 Harvard Design Magazine article titled “The Past in the
Present: The Life of Memorials” that the process of commemoration requires “that the
object of commemoration be understood as a completed stage of history, safely nestled in
a sealed-off past.”
43
In modern American society, slavery is not a completed stage of
American history, nor has the reverberating impact been fully grasped or understood. The
trauma of slavery as a historical chapter of the United States’ national narrative is muted,
silenced, and made invisible by the omission of federal commemorative projects because
of the erroneous assumption that slavery is dead. If an event is only worthy of
commemoration in its death, then extant slavery problematizes the commemorative act.
Racial slavery trumps the language of modern Western monuments and memorials,

41
Hartman 62.

42
Ibid.

43
Savage, “The Past in the Present: The Life of Memorials,” 2.
21
further exposing the impossibilities of this genre of public art. Monuments and memorials
as “invocations of the past”
44
and as “activations of memory”
45
recognize and venerate an
obscure recount, thereby designating a distance or departure from the past. This
separation denotes and assumes the past as complete or finished, a permanent point in a
chronicled historiography from which an individual, a community, or a nation has
departed and progressed. Racial slavery is a blemish, a monstrosity unwelcome in the hall
of equality, justice, and democracy that underscores the municipal foundation of the
United States of America and the absence of federal monuments and memorials to this
historical travesty is a distinct gesture to bypass the trauma of slavery.

44
Rustom Bharucha, Experiments with Truth: Translational Justice and the Processes of Truth and
Reconciliation: Documenta 11_Platform 2, ed. Okwui Enwezor and others (Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz; New
York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002): 366.

45
Bharucha 366.
22
IV. Bypassing the Trauma of Slavery

Monumental Substitutes

During Reconstruction, a number of efforts were launched to commemorate
Emancipation as a shining, victorious moment in the local and national struggles over
slavery and racial injustice. The aims of most of these proposed monuments were “to
reconstruct Lincoln himself, to establish him in official memory as the founder of a new
era in American history dedicated to the specific principle of racial equality.”
46
As art
historian Kirk Savage notes, “The commemoration of the Civil War in physical
memorials is ultimately a story of systematic cultural repression, carried out in the guise
of reconciliation and harmony.”
47
Savage amplifies the productivity of literal monuments
and how memorialization, in terms of public monuments and memorials, constructs and
produces an articulated relationship between the nation and the subject. He writes, “The
great flowering of the public monument in postrevolutionary Western societies is surely
linked to the rise of nationalism and the nationalist demand for tangible symbols and
traditions that could make the idea of the nation credible.”
48
Through Savage’s
explanation, we see the struggles for power relative to the nation and collective identity
and how the figure of Lincoln operates within the public imaginary. Memorials to
Lincoln inscribe the national narrative of the United States with liberatory accounts of
emancipation, thereby situating Lincoln as a celebrated national emblem of redemption
and bypassing the terror and trauma of slavery.

46
Kirk Savage, “The Politics of Memory: Black Emancipation and the Civil War Monument,” 138.

47
Ibid., 143.

48
Ibid., 146.
23
Countless commemorations in the form of monuments, memorials, and federal
holidays illustrate how the American public imagination of slavery fixates on Lincoln as
liberator. The discursive power of memorialization and the absence of a site of
engagement with the trauma of slavery are made apparent by this constructed
substitution, which is itself an act of re-construction and redress. The monumentality of
the Lincoln Memorial, with its Greek temple style and Doric columns, mythologizes the
figure of Lincoln. The sculpture of Lincoln is contemplative and stern, representing a
firm leader remiss of the controversy and overshadows of his tenure, his assassination,
and his pivotal performance in one of the most tumultuous periods in American history.
The alignment of the Lincoln Memorial with the United States Capitol and the
Washington Monument, all located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. cements
his image as a symbol of progress within the public imaginary.
The image of Lincoln is crucial to the argument concerning an absence of federal
commemorations to slavery in the public domain in that he functions as a surrogate.
Official commemorations to Lincoln such as the Lincoln Memorial and The Freedmen’s
Memorial to Abraham Lincoln (Emancipation Monument), both located on the capitol
grounds in Washington, are celebratory instead of expressive of the struggle and trauma
of slavery. They are pacifications and indications of which histories are legitimized in the
United States’ national narrative.

The Incapacities of Sculpture, Reconstruction, and The Freedmen’s Memorial

The language of the classic 19
th
century Western monument uses the body as
subject to capture the ideal human form. This ideal human form was relegated to the
24
white male body thus making the white male body synonymous with mastery and
creating the impossible condition of representing the black slave body. Kirk Savage
writes, “Sculpture in the classical tradition was devoted to the human body in its most
noble and divine form. The body, in effect, was a metaphor for mastery, and slavery was
the very antithesis of that ideal.”
49
Since slavery was conceived, enforced, and justified
by a system that declared the black race inferior, neither slavery nor black bodies were
masterful; slavery outmaneuvered the sculptural medium. Savage avows, “Sculpture was
embedded in the theoretical foundation of racism that supported American slavery and
survived long after its demise. For racism, like sculpture, centered on the analysis and
representation of the human body.”
50
Racism enveloped sculpture and, as Savage
continues, “The sculpture of antiquity thus became an authenticating document of a
normative white body, a ‘race’ of white men.”
51
Consequently, the governing of
representation inherent in the medium of sculpture contributed to the failure of monument
and memorial language and facilitates historical amnesia in the United States in terms of
slavery.
52

Ellipses in America’s cultural landscape, and subsequently its national narrative,
as Savage outlines, began in the Reconstruction period when the country was faced with

49
Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 15.

50
Ibid., 8.

51
Ibid., 9.

52
Social Darwinism was bastardized for the sake of racial eugenics, which informed representations of
bodies in the United States – particularly around the practice of photography. This is where the notion of
the archive relative to typologies of race, ethnicity, and class enters the discussion and this photographed
typing of the body relates to sculptural representations in terms of an idealized and de-idealized body type.
See Elizabeth Edwards’ Anthropology and Photography 1860-1920 (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1994) and John Tagg’s Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
25
recasting its identity. The United States erupted in Civil War over the emancipation of
four million slaves, and the unified democratic public that the United States government
sought to establish was dismantled. The division of the country into the Union and the
Confederacy emphasized the significance of slavery and its role in the shaping of
American society; slavery was essential to the rising establishment of America’s
dominant power base. The outcome of the American Civil War, with the Union emerging
as the victor, declared slavery’s demise and catalyzed a new set of concerns regarding
how to commemorate this portion of history. The most problematic facet of this new set
of concerns was how to commemorate the slave and the slave’s emancipated integration
into society. Many of the soldiers who fought in the Civil War, in both the Union and the
Confederacy, were freed slaves and an integral part of the United States’ national
narrative. They deserved to be honored. However, the medium of sculpture used in
monuments and memorials was not equipped to face this dilemma.
Post-Civil War Reconstruction challenged assumedly fixed notions of an
American public. As Savage explains, “Once abolished, slavery forced itself into the
domain of memory,”
53
it was “there to be reckoned with in one way or another -
suppressed, integrated, romanticized.”
54
The inauguration of the institution of racial
slavery branded blacks unequal. Slaves were unfit to be categorized as human and
consequently characterized as grotesque and brute. However, the abolition of slavery
purportedly changed the status of slaves to humans instead of cattle or property, legally
incorporating them into the whole. As a result, the official memory of slavery was no

53
Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 5.

54
Ibid.
26
longer exclusively for slaveholders, abolitionists, or the Great Emancipator. Due to
slavery’s abolition and its national recognition as inhumane and savage, slaves and the
entire public now officially warranted the cultural memory of slavery. The insertion of
slaves into “the people” displaced the national identity of the United States, amplifying
the politics of representation in ways unimaginable. Kirk Savage highlights this tense
historical rupture. He writes, “the abolition of slavery precipitated a new . . . momentous
struggle over the idea of race and the terms of citizenship in a nation supposedly
dedicated to equality.”
55
But “slaves could not shed bondage like a suit of clothes; they
had to find new identities, new ways of work, new routes into society. Nor could the
larger society suddenly shed its tradition of slavery without facing fundamental
challenges to its own institutions and identity.”
56
The American state's construction of
national belonging was ruptured and demanded a rewriting in the aftermath of the Civil
War. This challenge to the country’s identity makes the lapses in memory more complex
by an absence of slavery memorials in the United States.
As an attempt to counter the challenge to the American identity and offer at least
one formidable commemorative response to slavery, The Freedmen’s Memorial to
Abraham Lincoln (Emancipation Monument)
57
was commissioned and installed in 1876
near the end of the Reconstruction period amidst sustained controversy.

55
Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 4.

56
Ibid., 3.

57
See Figure 1 on p. 27.
27
Figure 1

Thomas Ball’s Freedmen’s Memorial to Abraham Lincoln (Emancipation Monument), installed in 1876,
Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C. Photo courtesy of Rodney A. Young (2003).

As one of the most noted slavery memorials in the American landscape, The Freedmen’s
Memorial depicts Abraham Lincoln as a symbol of justice and as the omnipresent savior
pulling the exploited slave out of misery and inferiority. Savage describes, “Kneeling on
the ground, the African American once again becomes the foil by which we measure the
superiority of the white deity above him.”
58
Savage elaborates in his visual analysis of
The Freedmen’s Memorial and the work this type of imaging does for the memory of
slavery in the public domain by comparing the freed slave depicted in The Freedmen’s
Memorial to that of a crouching “Mary Magdalene at the feet of the American Christ,
Abraham Lincoln.”
59
By emphasizing the transparent image of Lincoln as savior, The
Freedmen’s Memorial “implicitly assigns the subject [of slavery] to black memory

58
Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 18.

59
Savage, “The Politics of Memory: Black Emancipation and the Civil War Monument,” 128.
28
instead of national memory; the whole project is supposed to record black gratitude to the
white benefactor.”
60
Abraham Lincoln, as the iconic and supreme white European male
form established by the sculptural language of 19
th
-century Western public monuments,
overshadows the slave and reinforces the stereotypical inferiority ascribed to the slave
subject. This figuring reiterates a narrative of colonialism, bondage, and servitude that is
relegated to black cultural memory and preserved in the national imagination.
The Freedmen’s Memorial to Abraham Lincoln (Emancipatoin Monument)
upholds racism; even the title of the memorial itself reinforces these impracticalities.
Consequently, “African Americans loomed as the unspeakable reality”
61
not solely
because of political divisiveness, but because “the age-old status of the slave combined
with the newer concept of race created an extremely powerful cultural formation that
rendered the African American virtually the embodiment of what was not sculptural.”
62

“The traditional Western monument glorifies . . . its subject,”
63
as Savage attests, making
it an incompetent conduit for the memory of slavery and exposing the failures of the
language of traditional memorial and monument sculpture. In 19
th
century America,
“monuments openly sympathetic to slavery did not exist.”
64
Unfortunately, the absence in
openly sympathetic monuments to slavery persists in 21
st
century America as a result of
the Western monument’s failure to provide an opportunity for public engagement with
the memory of slavery.

60
Ibid., 140.

61
Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 15.
62
Ibid.

63
Sturken 121.

64
Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 129.
29
V. Re-reading, Re-telling, and Re-writing the Crisis of Slavery

The interstices of breach and crisis that redress inhabits are where the trauma of
slavery is situated. Nestled between history and memory, redress necessitates a re-reading
and re-telling of a singular history to make room for and to understand certain political
projects that have or have not arisen out of the abolition of chattel slavery in the United
States. Saidiya Hartman, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia
University, unpacks the analytic utility of redress. For the purposes of this study, I use the
first of Hartman’s three-pronged definition, which she outlines in her book Scenes of
Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. She states,
“redress is a re-membering of the social body that occurs precisely in the recognition and
articulation of devastation, captivity, and enslavement.”
65
Following Hartman, federal
commemorative projects to the trauma of slavery have the potential to re-member the
American social body and re-narrate American history in contrast to the archive of
monuments and memorials to enslavers, emancipators, and abolitionists. Hartman also
says that though redress is not a complete or adequate process, “the failure of full
recovery or recompense, the inability to fully occupy an imagined prior condition or to
bridge the divide of the split subject, is what drives redress,”
66
thus hijacking the
liberatory possibilities of emancipation and setting the stage for the work of memory. As
Hartman points out, “Redress . . . is poised between breach and mounting crisis,”
67

65
Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century
America, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997): 76-77.

66
Ibid., 75.

67
Ibid., 77.
30
brandishing the disruptive possibilities of the trauma of slavery. The ruptured social body
and identity of the United States in the wake of war, abolition, and emancipation is where
the opportunities for redressive responses and strategies are located.

Responses and Strategies
In Chapter 4, I examined art historian Kirk Savage’s critical endeavors into the
racialization of sculpture and the idealization of the white male form as a condition of
impossibility in relation to the representation of black bodies and the trauma of slavery.
Film critic and historian Clyde Taylor similarly investigates the conditions for troubling a
normative European aesthetic through black artistic expression in television and cinema.
Taylor’s approach questions the complicity of liberalism in producing a constructed
subject and nation and can serve as an analytic in thinking through the performative role
of Lincoln as a beacon of progress and emancipation. In his book The Mask of Art:
Breaking the Aesthetic Contract, Taylor asserts “the unspeakable is rendered mute in
order to throw a polite silence over contradictions felt as socially unbearable.”
68
This
assertion highlights a crisis in representation in terms of slavery in the United States
along with making light of liberalism’s complicity in sustaining a project of recognition
and inclusion that is facilitated by such muted renderings. Taylor’s larger project is a
critique of this complicity and of a grand, national narrative of pluralist liberty that
sustains the United States national project. Within this context, the unspeakability that
interests Taylor is a form of censorship, a political strategy used to manage subjects in the
state and nation by normalizing an absence of blackness that is predicated upon

68
Clyde Taylor, The Mask of Art: Breaking the Aesthetic Contract (Bloomington: Indiana University Press:
1998): 5.
31
difference and deviance and embedded in opposition to whiteness. Following Taylor, this
logic serves an expository purpose for thinking through forms of redress and
reconstitution relative to the representation of slavery in the social and public
imaginaries.
In addition to Morrison, Savage, and Taylor, the discourse of the unspeakable
69
is
taken up in the art practices of Fred Wilson, Sam Durant, Kara Walker, and Krzysztof
Wodiczko. Conceptual artist Fred Wilson’s 1992-1993 project titled Mining the Museum
exhibited at the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore excavated the museum’s
archived collections and re-framed an alternative history that is rarely displayed in
museums.
70
One ‘mined’ work titled Metalwork, 1723-1880 juxtaposed an ornate silver
teakettle and teacups and slave shackles encased together. Wilson’s project further
exposes the tension between official and unofficial narratives, accompanying power
relations, and the privileging of a singular hegemonic history.
71
Another artist who
engages with the tensions between official and unofficial history, power relations,
cultural trauma, and collective memory is California Institute of the Arts faculty member
Sam Durant. With such provocations as the Proposal for White and Indian Dead
Monument Transpositions, Washington D.C., Sam Durant’s conceptual practice calls us
to interrogate the type of language that becomes part of collective memory and, in turn,

69
Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw discusses at length the discourse of the unspeakable in her detailed account of
Kara Walker’s artistic trajectory in Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2004).

70
Fred Wilson and Ivan Karp, “Constructing the Spectacle of Culture in Museums” in Art in Context:
Rethinking the New World, ed. by Christian Krazagna, (Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2001): 258.

71
Ibid.
32
think about what gets privileged, commissioned, and easily consumed in the public
domain.
Perhaps the most recent and most provocative art practice addressing the
unsettling unspeakability of trauma, though, is painter, video and installation artist Kara
Walker’s silhouette paintings and performative interventions in gallery spaces. Walker’s
encounters with the discourse of the unspeakable are brought to bear in Kara Walker: My
Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, the title of Walker’s traveling mid-
career retrospective.
72
Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My
Love expresses the entangled and interpolated history of the master-slave relationship in
American slavery and contemporary articulations of whiteness and blackness. To further
expose the tensions, traumas, and absences to which the formations of master and slave,
black and white, state and nation are subjected, Walker employs a palette of absurdity,
terror, and satire to “arrest control after destabilizing normalcy.”
73
Walker’s silhouettes
are “vehicles for psychosis,” for severe disorder, for deranging reality.
In addition to the disturbingly evocative imagery complete with hypersexual
overtones, physical and psychological abuse, and inversed or internalized desires, Walker
makes use of the cyclorama to comment on both the elaborate fictions that are written
into legacies of slavery and racism in America and the silenced schisms between official
and unofficial histories. Walker’s adaptation of the nineteenth-century cyclorama
74
is a

72
Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love (2007-2008) was originally
exhibited at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, then it traveled to the Whitney Museum of
American Art in New York City, New York and the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, California.

73
Kara Walker, interview by Gary Garrels, UCLA Hammer Museum, March 2, 2008.

33
metaphor for grand historical narratives. The cyclorama as emblematic of grand history
painting translates to a visualization of metanarratives, and Walker’s invocation of this
translation is a strategic encounter with the fabricated national narrative of progress.
More specifically, Walker’s work directly interrogates the American national projects of
modernity and liberalism. Art historian Thomas McEvilley details the work of modernity
and liberalism with which Walker’s practice engages and critiques. In his catalogue essay
“Primitivism in the Works of an Emancipated Negress,” McEvilley writes, “It was
modernism that taught us that history is essentially imbued with the mandate of progress,
and that the evaluation of right and wrong depends on that mandate.”
75
Walker’s work
destabilizes the mandates of progress and morality and is a testament to the disruptive
potential of slavery to traumatize the progressive metanarrative of the United States.
In the catalogue essay titled “Triangular Trade: Coloring, Re-marking, and
Narrative in the Writings of Kara Walker,” poet Kevin Young discusses Walker’s use of
text and language. He writes, “Here, Walker seems interested less in deconstruction than
reconstruction – in rebuilding a South [or even an America] that never existed yet will
never die. In her hands (and type) Reconstruction, the experiment of black power that
was stymied by violence and disenfranchisement, becomes a fantastical redressing of
grievances and an undressing of the South’s petticoats and pretty fictions.”
76
Walker is

74
Walker often references her experience of the cyclorama titled The Battle of Atlanta while growing up in
Stone Mountain, Georgia, a small suburb of Atlanta. See Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw’s Seeing the
Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004): 39.

75
Thomas McEvilley, “Primitivism in the Works of an Emancipated Negress,” in Kara Walker: My
Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, exh. cat. (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2007): 60.

76
Kevin Young, “Triangular Trade: Coloring, Re-marking, and Narrative in the Writings of Kara Walker”
in Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, exh. cat. (Minneapolis: Walker Art
Center, 2007): 45.
34
interested in the fictions, romances, and ruses of power. Walker’s manipulation of
language and text literalizes the violence, terror, and trauma of antebellum slavery,
master-slave relationships, power regimes, and personal narratives that her silhouettes
visualize.
In an April 2007 Artforum International review of Kara Walker’s 2007-2008
retrospective, critic and artist Carroll Dunham writes that the three short films
77
exhibited
“internalize what we customarily regard as public cultural history while exposing the
deepest imaginings of the consensually private self.”
78
It is no wonder that Walker’s
visual vocabulary hinges on the internal inscriptions that dwell in the recesses of the
public and social imaginaries. Walker’s work is a poignant envisage concerning the
making and remaking of not only an African American identity but of an American
identity as informed by the memory and history of slavery’s legacy in America itself.
Walker’s work is a rupturing of the shared mythology of slavery in black and white. The
blank spaces and hollows of the cultural unconsciousness is where Walker situates her
work. The acute dimensionality and simplicity of the work in Kara Walker: My
Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love is the mode by which the materiality of
the trauma of slavery gets digested. Walker’s visual vocabulary and methodology is the
theater in which the discourse of the unspeakable, the morbidity of desire and terror gets
rehearsed and played out against the backdrop of antebellum slavery and racism. This is
where the disruptive and disturbing potential of the work lies. Walker’s interests are not

77
Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened (2004); 8 Possible Beginnings: or The Creation of African-
America, a Moving Picture by Kara E. Walker (2005); “. . . the angry surface of some grey and threatening
sea” (2007).

78
Carroll Dunham, “Film Noir,” Artforum International (April 2007): 241.
35
just in slavery alone, but more broadly she is interested in cultural traumas, the perpetual
distances from such traumas, and the silent spaces that the distances create.
Is the goal of a slavery memorial to keep the resonant trauma of slavery from
slipping into what Andreas Huyssen calls “mythic memory?”
79
Or is the disruptive power
of a slavery memorial in the public domain that which shakes open a neglected space in
the continuum of history? As a proposed response to the set of problematics outlined in
this paper, Krzysztof Wodiczko’s interventionist strategies might offer some relief. As
temporary interventions, they trouble both the spatiotemporal assumptions attached to
memory as a fixed entity and the translation of these assumptions to monuments and
memorials. Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko
80
is known for his large-scale slide and
video projections in the public domain. Wodiczko frequently chooses architectural
facades and monuments as his sites for intervention. Wodiczko’s projections onto
existing monuments recontextualize the site by rearticulating the layers of memory that
are inscribed there and excavating the sediments of meaning. Like his inSITE 2001
project wherein he projected abused women’s testimonies onto the façade of El Centro
Cultural located in Tijuana, Mexico, a similar approach could be employed to project
archived audio and visual recordings of the Works Progress Administrations’ Born in
Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938, or even
projecting the silhouette cuttings and video works of Kara Walker, onto the Lincoln
Memorial located in the nation’s capital. This gesture would, in turn, reconstitute the site

79
Huyssen, “Memory and Monument in a Postmodern Age,” 250.

80
Wodiczko is also a professor and director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
36
as well as complicate and alter the national narrative of liberty, progress, and democracy
that is assigned to celebratory commemorations to Lincoln in the public domain.

Conclusion
The theoretical and historical discourses along with the curatorial and public
projects examined in this thesis return us to the scene of the historical rupture of slavery
rather than leaving behind or silencing an unsightly past. In this context, the image of
Abraham Lincoln as a restorative symbol of progress can be read as a disavow, a cover
story for a kind of postponement of trauma and reconciliation. The memorialization of
Lincoln represents his performative role of healing and of holding together the tenuous
parts of a post-Emancipation exclusionary situation in the United States. The trauma of
chattel bondage reverberates through a litany of struggles over nationalisms and personal
and collective identities. The memory of slavery is the terrain on which “the violent
discontinuities of history introduced by the Middle Passage, the contradiction of captivity
and enslavement, and the experience of loss and affiliation”
81
are lived and negotiated.
This study into the absence of slavery memorials in the United States is not just about
remembering and forgetting. It is about the dominant norms that stand to be challenged
and dethroned by the disruptive possibility of the engagement with slavery in the public
domain. Potentially, slavery memorials are sites of resistance to a constructed, singular,
official history. Therefore, it is not merely sufficient to identify and tease out the
problematics and insert what is missing. The task at hand is far more complex than a
simple inventory of memory. It is about slavery as an already limited and prescribed

81
Hartman 73.
37
situation and the liberatory and redressive possibilities that exist in sites of engagement
with slavery and emancipation in the United States landscape.

38
Bibliography

Bell, Duncan, ed. Memory, Trauma and World Politics: Reflections on the Relationship
Between Past and Present. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and
Citizenship. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.

Brown, Wendy. Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.

Dunham, Carroll. “Film Noir.” Artforum International. April 2007.

Edwards, Elizabeth. Anthropology and Photography 1860-1920. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1994.

Enwezor, Okwui, ed. Democracy's Images: Photography and Visual Art after Apartheid.
Umea, Sweden: BildMuseet, 1998.
---Experiments with Truth: Translational Justice and the Processes of Truth and
Reconciliation: Documenta 11_Platform 2, ed. Okwui Enwezor and others.
Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz; New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002.

Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-
1977. New York: Pantheon, 1980.
---The History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasure. Vintage, 1990.

Gray, Herman. Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-
Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Huyssen, Andreas. “Monument and Memory in a Postmodern Age.” In The Yale Journal
of Criticism 6, 2 (1993).
--- Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Palo Alto: Stanford
University Press, 2003.

McEvilley, Thomas. “Primitivism in the Works of an Emancipated Negress.” In Kara
Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, exh. cat. Minneapolis:
Walker Art Center, 2007.

Mitchell, W.J. Thomas. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

39
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Savage, Kirk. “The Past in the Present: The Life of Memorials,” Harvard Design
Magazine 9 (Fall 1999): 2, http://gsd.harvard.edu/research/publications/hdm/back/
9savage.html
---“The Politics of Memory: Black Emancipation and the Civil War Monument.” In
Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity ed. by John R. Gillis. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994.
---Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century
America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Schwartz, Barry. “The Social Context of Commemoration: A Study in Collective
Memory.” Social Forces 61, 2 (December 1982).

Shaw, Gwendolyn DuBois. Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker. Durham:
Duke University Press, 2004.

Sturken, Marita. “The Wall, the Screen, and the Image: The Vietnam Veterans
Memorial,” Representations 35, Special Issue: Monumental Stories (1991).

Tagg, John. Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Taylor, Clyde. The Mask of Art: Breaking the Aesthetic Contract. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1998.

Taylor, Jane. “Holdings: Refiguring the Archive” in Refiguring the Archive, ed. Carolyn
Williams and others. Cape Town: David Philip Publishers, 2002.

Walker, Kara. Interview with Gary Garrels. UCLA Hammer Museum, March 2, 2008.

Wilson, Fred and Ivan Karp. “Constructing the Spectacle of Culture in Museums.” In Art
in Context: Rethinking the New World, ed. by Christian Krazagna. Kunsthaus
Bregenz, 2001.

Young, Kevin. “Triangular Trade: Coloring, Re-marking, and Narrative in the Writings
of Kara Walker.” In Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My
Love, exh. cat. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2007.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Temporary or permanent? Considering time, memory and history in public art projects

PDF

Holocaust commemoration and the creation of living memory: how the Jewish Museum Berlin, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe assert the past in the fab...

PDF

Contemporary art and "post-black" identity politics

PDF

Reconsideration of permanent percent for art works in the public sphere: a case study of public art commissioned by the community redevelopment agency of the city of Los Angeles

PDF

Biennial rising: Prospect.1 New Orleans and the post-disaster arts movement

PDF

Art and time: temporary public art and contentious space

PDF

Public art in Houston: administrative structure analysis and artist guidebook

PDF

Collaborative art practice in the public sphere: The death of the artist?

PDF

The multivalent platforms of alternative art publications as agents of authentic cultural change

PDF

Cultivating the arts in rural communities of the San Joaquin valley

PDF

In the art of revolution: integrating community arts into the existing development work of non-government organizations in Guatemala and El Salvador

PDF

Expression of identity: Maori Ta Moko and the utilization of the internet

PDF

A plastic picturesque: notions of public as projected through the works of Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol

PDF

Power performance: benevolence and violence in the work of Chris Burden, Barbara T. Smith, Yoko Ono and Wafaa Bilal

PDF

Art and cultural diplomacy in the international exhibition: documenta 1 and Prospect.1

PDF

Performing the collective

PDF

Artistic intervention in the Los Angeles urban geography: the art practices of Charles Long, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn

PDF

Elevated: Ballet and culture in the United States, World War II to the National Endowment for the Arts

PDF

Witnessing silence: testimony, performance, and the poetics of the unspeakable

PDF

Mejor vida/better life and day-to-day exchanges: Networks of social exchange in contemporary arts practice

Asset Metadata

Creator Barber, Tiffany Elizabeth (author)

Core Title Lapses in memory: slavery memorials and historical amnesia in the United States

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Public Art Studies

Degree Program Public Art Studies

Publication Date 05/05/2008

Defense Date 04/01/2008

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag American studies,cultural trauma,memorialization,memory,OAI-PMH Harvest,public art,reconstruction

Place Name USA (countries)

Language English

Advisor Firstenberg, Lauri (committee chair), Decter, Joshua (committee member), Gray, Herman (committee member), Weisberg, Ruth (committee member)

Creator Email tbarber@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m1227

Unique identifier UC1102927

Identifier etd-Barber-20080505 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-67635 (legacy record id),usctheses-m1227 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Barber-20080505.pdf

Dmrecord 67635

Document Type Thesis

Rights Barber, Tiffany Elizabeth

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu