National Amnesia Research Articles

Forgetting New Orleans

In late October of 2007, over two years since Katrina, the Orleans Times-Picayune was featuring front-page articles on the wild-fires that had recently destroyed over thousand homes in California. Under their headline No Comparison, local news reports documented, bit by bit, the facts of the two disasters that managed to get erased as FEMA staged fake news conference and California evacuees ate gourmet food and received massages in the San Diego sports arena. The stories described this strange flashback as evidence of the way that the disaster of Katrina is not entirely forgotten, but gets disturbingly recast again and again, as if New Orleans' biblical flood lurks just below the surface of American (Katrina Angle AI). The idea that the flooding of Orleans lurks in the spectacle-hungry American consciousness once again offers us the image of Orleans as forgotten and as place where it is fun to forget things. As an image recurring in the annals of cultural memory and in nation expert in the workings of amnesia, (1) the has become poster site for erasing the past and therefore ensuring that everything is possible, legacy inscribed in its tourist emblem--New Orleans, The City that Care Forgot. America is lured to this place of forgetting, where we can come down and have some fun, as United States President disingenuously suggested to the nation after his quick flight over this disaster zone in history. But there are some places, uncanny sites in history, where traumatic enactments of the past break through the surface of the present and linger. They linger because, unlike the durable statues of selected icons or well-preserved documents in museums, they remain spectral. They elude the crystallizing effects of memory and they keep recurring, like an old song that won't go away. This song is what Sidney Bechet, clarinetist at Preservation Hall who performed the music of Orleans across the world, called the song, as he put it, a thing the music had to know for sure ... gotta hear it starting way behind you (qtd. in Floyd 8-9). He meant the forgotten story of his people, his grandfather who was slave, who likely sang the song in Congo Square in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. But beyond even all that, it's song that keeps breaking through the seams of tidy history built on selective erasures and national amnesia. We can keep tracing this song farther and farther back because it always precedes history. It is thoroughly oral; it escapes encampment in narratives of nation and empire and in the written records of literature confined to literacy. Its rhythms and odd melodies beat at the heart of poetry and keep poetry at odds with history and philosophy, because it is song about problem that won't go away, about pain-wracked body that keeps reemerging throughout history, or in sweltering attics after flood. The long song is preserved in performance venues throughout the city, from old bars in Bywater, or in parts of Central City where few tourists would dare to walk these days, to the more hip clubs on Frenchman Street in the Marigny. And it gets featured at Preservation Hall where can hear its sounds for just few dollars donation and short step into the city's dark alleys, and where, just across the courtyard from the former slave quarters, can purchase records and CDs of the past. A few blocks away lies Congo Square--the place where the Houma Indians once gathered for their festivals, where Choctaw women sold vegetables and herbs in the markets, where Africans from Senegambia and the Congo gathered for those markets and for song and dance on Sundays, where poor Italians who once flooded the city took up asylum nearby before they settled throughout the old sections of town with their St. Joseph altars. (2) Congo Square, now surrounded by tall locked iron fence, hulks over the landscape like prison, as if incarcerating song that will only be allowed to circulate on very special occasions. …

“All injury’s forgot”: Restoration Sex Comedy and National Amnesia

Why should a foolish marriage vow Which long ago was made, Oblige us to each other now When passion is decayed? We loved, and we loved, as long as we could, Till our love was loved out in us both. But our marriage is dead, when the pleasure is fled: Twas pleasure first made it an oath. (1) John Dryden's Marriage a la Mode (1673), one of the first of the Restoration, opens with the above song presented by Doralice, who has grown bored enough with her husband Rhodophil to consider sleeping with his friend Palamede. This song, in which Doralice questions the obligation to fidelity, might be taken as a rallying cry for the comedy genre, a loosely defined group of plays, written in the twenty years or so following the Restoration of Charles II, that explores the boundaries of acceptable sexual relations and thus potentially, by extension, analogy, or direct link, challenge traditional authoritarian structures in general. (2) As Susan Staves has shown, profound skepticism about the foundation of royal authority at this time generated parallel skepticism about traditional forms of familial authority. Both comedies and heroic plays thus often explore the possibility of marriage, like government, as contractual rather than patriarchal, granting women new capacities to choose a husband. (3) Certainly, libertine comedies sometimes include such tensions: in Aphra Behn's The Rover (1677), for example, a father's authority gives way to the daughters' individual choices. (4) Yet in their exploration of libertine sexuality, and not just the individual choice of a marriage partner, these plays raise other issues as well that are not entirely explicable through tensions between Filmerian and Lockean models of authority, or through conflicts between aristocratic and bourgeois ideologies. Political and ideological readings of libertine comedies have tended to focus on the class and gender identities of individual characters, as well as the social forces that those characters engage, confront, and represent. (5) I want to suggest, however, that reading sex comedies for their representations of family, community, and nation, rather than for the individual gendered and class-related conflicts over freedom and constraint, brings their political force and political anxieties more sharply into focus. Even if she is thinking about herself, Doralice asks a broad philosophical question (why should a marriage vow ...) rather than an individual one (why should I ...) that, paradoxically, leaves traditional social structures of marriage in place but challenges its presumed foundation, understood in both the Filmerian and Lockean models to rest on fidelity. The significance and uniqueness of this subset of comedies, then, lies less in their partisanship and more in their philosophical exploration of the proposed erotic foundation of civil society itself. Libertine experimentation does not, as Robert D. Hume reminds us, represent the spirit of the age; (6) on the contrary, these plays were always controversial. Even at the height of the popularity of libertine drama, attacks on dissolute elite behavior appeared regularly in print. We cannot, then, explain challenges like the one expressed by Doralice by simply presuming a widespread acceptance of libertine behavior in the culture or even in the court. (7) Instead, we must take it as a genuine inquiry and even a genuine challenge. In this essay, I will look at two classic libertine comedies, Marriage la Mode and The Country Wife (1675), with glances at a few others, to revisit the workings of this genre, the challenges the plays propose, and their own strategies for responding to these challenges. Doralice's song does not simply advocate libertine indulgence, but rather introduces an historically specific exploration in the play of what, in this post-revolutionary, post-divine-right, and post-absolutist world, still prevents her and Palamede from sleeping together. …

Jews and Queers: Symptoms of Modernity in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna

“We have all suffered,” remarked the Austrian chancellor Leopold Figl in 1946, looking back at Austria during the Nazi period (p. 34). This blanket affirmation of Austrian victimhood became the ideological basis of the postwar Austrian state and mandated an inability or refusal to recognize that some Austrians had suffered rather more than others, while some Austrians had actively contributed to the suffering of others by their participation in the Nazi regime. This Austrian victim myth was left largely intact for forty years until the controversy that erupted around the election to the presidency in 1986 of Kurt Waldheim, whose convenient suppression of his own Nazi past was emblematic of Austria's more general national amnesia.

Unreconstructed Democracy: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Case for Reparations

W. E. B. Du Bois's observations about the links between Americans' unwillingness to acknowledge the legacies of slavery and the shortcomings of formal equality in the post-Reconstruction era anticipate the obstacles to racial justice in the “post-civil rights” era. His study of the “splendid failure” of Reconstruction indicates how a kind of willful national amnesia prevented black citizens from enjoying in fact the freedom and equality they were guaranteed by law. Arguing that the story of racial injustice is still importantly a story about memory's suppression, I use Du Bois's writings to explore the case for reparations as one element of a larger effort to expose the presence of the slave past and to undermine the continuing effects of slavery and Jim Crow. Memory—of what has been, of acts of commission or omission, of a responsibility abdicated—affects the future conduct of power in any form. Failure to adopt some imaginative recognition of such a principle merely results in the enthronement of a political culture that appears to know no boundaries—the culture of impunity.Wole Soyinka (1999)Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the 2000 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Washington, DC, the 2001 meeting of the Collegium for African American Research in Sardinia, Italy, and the 2002 Riker Seminar and Frederick Douglass Institute Seminar at the University of Rochester. I am grateful for the comments of all of the participants at those sessions, as well as for careful readings by Joshua Dienstag, Roxanne Euben, Frederick Harris, George Klosko, James Johnson, Joel Olson, George Shulman, Valeria Sinclair-Chapman, Jeffrey Tucker, and Stephen White.

Review: Out National Amnesia About Race: A Review Essay of David Blight's Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

Review: Out National Amnesia About Race: A Review Essay of David Blight's Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory