Black Memory Landscapes Sites of Remembrance and Resistance

Lists of figures

List of contributors

Introduction

Roger C. Aden and Patricia G. Davis

Part 1—Repairing the Past: Black Reparative Memory

1.      Crafting a Necessary Space: The Case of the North Carolina Freedom Park

        Victoria J. Gallagher

2.     “Another Piece of My History Kept from Erasure”: Making Black History Visible at NYC’s African Burial Ground

        Amy Sodaro

3.     Navigating A White Habitus: Black Resistance, Memory, and Temporality at the Whitney Plantation

        Shelby R. Crow

4.     Centering Black Women in Public Spaces: Institutionalizing Black Geographies of Public Memory

        Marci B. Littlefield

5.     “Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina” at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts

         Patricia G. Davis

6.     Rhetorics of Redemption: Race, Reparative Memory, and the Reckoning of 2020

        Stephen E. Rahko and Byron B Craig

Part 2—Resisting the Past: Black Memories and Public Critique

7.     Understanding a Violent Memoryscape and Building Better Memoryships: The Wilmington Coup d’état of 1898

             Ariel Seay

8.     Ghosts of New Orleans: Memories of Death and Race in the Crescent City

        Jenny Woodley

9.     Defying Displacement: The Activist Legacy of The Paul Robeson House and Museum in West Philadelphia

        Amy E. Potter, Matthew R. Cook, LaToya E. Eaves, Perry L. Carter, and Candace Bright Hall-Wurst

10.  Tokenism, (In)visibility, or Presence: A Case Study of Three Memory Spaces in West Chester, PA

        Casey R. Schmitt, Tyanna Alexander, and Lenora Overton

Part 3—Recovering the Past: Black Vernacular Memories

11.  Our Hope, Our Fight, Our Land: African American Heirs’ Property and the Work of Vernacular Commemoration

       Celnisha Dangerfield

12.  The Black Devotional Movement and its Community Aesthetic: Honoring the Contributions of Queer, Womanist Memory Workers of the African Diaspora

       MacKenzie River Foy

13.  Black Stories in White Spaces: Working through History, Memory, and Identity in the Rural U.S.         

       Stephanie Coley

14.  A Place Made Holy: Constructing the Sacred at George Floyd Memorial Square

       Skyler Meeks

Part 4—Reconnecting with the Past: Black Public Memory and the African Diaspora 

15.  Black Family Memory and African Diasporic History

       Nemata Blyden

16.  African Migration Stories: The Role of Memories in Contemporary Global Meaning-Making

      Toyin Falola

17.  A Fusion of Traditional and New Memoryscapes: Geo-spatial Technologies and Built Heritage Preservation in Benin as Postcolonial Memory Praxis

        Jessica M. Parr, H. Killion Mokwete, Bahare Sanaie-Movahed, and Patricia G. Davis.

Index

Biography

Roger C. Aden is Charles E. Zumkehr Professor of Speech Communication in the School of Communication Studies at Ohio University, USA. His research explores the rhetorical construction and interpretation of the meanings of physical and imagined places. He is the author of Popular Stories and Promised Lands: Fan Cultures and Symbolic Pilgrimages (1999), Upon the Ruins of Liberty: Slavery, the President's House at Independence National Historical Park, and Public Memory (2014) and Childhood Memory Spaces: How Enduring Memories of Childhood Places Shape Our Lives (2018). He is also editor of Rhetorics Haunting the National Mall: Displaced and Ephemeral Public Memories (2018) and US Public Memory, Rhetoric, and the National Mall (2018).

Patricia Davis is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, USA. Her research lies at the nexus of rhetoric and media studies and explores public memory, identity, race, gender, and representation. She is the author of Laying Claim: African American Cultural Memory and Southern Identity (2016), which won the Best Book Award from both the American Studies Division of the National Communication Association and the Critical/Cultural Studies Division of the National Communication Studies Association. She is also the co-editor, with Byron Craig and Stephen Rahko, of Rupturing Rhetoric: The Rhetorical Politics of Race and Popular Culture Since Ferguson (2024).