Surveying Memory: The Past in Black and White

Abstract

This much we know; not really, can never be, at all. It recalcitrant, stubbornly refusing to go away or be discarded. It haunts recovery and sabotages amnesia. The reminds--makes--us who we are and, sometimes, when we acknowledge that past, it also makes us wish we were not who we are. It fuels death and destruction, and it spurs acts of sacrifice and greatness. It renews, even, paradoxically, as it defies newness. In its inevitability, always everywhere, persisting into present and thus presaging future. The memorialized in monuments, museums, days on calendar, and sacred and quasi-sacred commemorative rituals; it packaged and sold as heritage tourism; it continually discussed, endlessly represented in various media, extensively used to judge morality or immorality of today, and repeatedly drawn on as a repository of moral and practical lessons. To take only most topical example of last point--that is, as lesson--the first President Bush reported to have said at conclusion of 1991 Gulf War: By God, we've kicked syndrome once and for all! (qtd in Herring 104). Meanwhile, second President Bush, now ensnared in another war in Iraq, increasingly reminded, by critics and events alike, that Vietnam syndrome, like it or not, alive and well and that term quagmire perhaps has more than mere historical resonance. So, to repeat, now quoting William Faulkner, the never dead, it not even past (85). In their many guises, memory studies have insightfully exploited this existential, orienting truth, a truth perhaps best expressed by Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit. Memory, he says, is not knowledge of past, it knowledge from past (14). Not exactly academic study of history--although it often practiced with great skill by historians such as Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, David Blight, and John Bodnar--scholarly inquiry into memory, perhaps especially exploration of collective and social memory, has proffered new questions about and interpretations of how individuals and collectivities are both constituted by and mobilize it for present-day projects. Place, purpose, and identity; meaning of national symbols; collective guilt and personal shame; ethnic and racial conflict; invention of traditions; repentance, reconciliation, and redemption--all of this and much more--now routinely motivate research of a large and growing number of interdisciplinary memory scholars. (1) Given that American South, more than any other region in country, visibly carries its sorrowful on its shoulders, it not surprising that region has become a focus of memory research. The South's continually recreated and renewed from within and without in media, from hundreds of newspaper articles across nation reflecting on horrors of racial segregation and legacy of civil rights movement, and films such as Mississippi Burning and Freedom Song, to recent truth-and-reconciliation-type trials of perpetrators of civil rights-era assassinations and church bombings in Mississippi and Alabama, to seemingly endless debate over meaning and proper public role (if any) of such Confederate symbols as St. Andrew's cross. It a past, largely sanitized in some memory sites, which can be experienced in Williamsburg, Natchez, Charleston, New Orleans, San Antonio, and dozens of other towns and cities promoting heritage tourism. It also a past, less sanitized to be sure, in Memphis, Atlanta, Birmingham, and Montgomery, in which one can not only experience what no longer but can also witness to world about what should have never been--a of racial barbarism. (2) The past, it seems, always present in South, and southerners repeatedly express genuine interest in their region's history. In a Southern Focus Poll, fielded by Center for Study of American South at University of North Carolina during fall of 1994, slightly more than two-thirds of all southerners strongly agreed or agreed with statement, I have a great deal of interest in history of South. …