Counter-tour as resuscitation: breathing life into the campus memory landscape

Abstract

ABSTRACT Based on a decade of work at my home campus, I argue that a counter-memory campus tour answers Ersula Ore and Matthew Houdek’s call for rhetorical storytelling of experiences and places related to race, violence, and white supremacy. I recount ways that counter-memory campus tours can “breathe life into memory” of first Black students and resuscitate their lived experience in profound ways for contemporary audiences. Amid campus landscapes marked by “white memorial time,” I argue that counter-memory tours resist that linearity, attend to the spatio-temporal politics of race and trauma, and honor our Black pioneers in higher education.