Observing White Supremacy Through the Rear View Mirror: Autoethnography and the Reconsideration of Memory

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 4:55 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Taking on Empires of Whiteness: Antiracism in Theory and Practice (Table 24)

Abstract

The painful memories of faculty of color, especially memories anchored in encounters with white supremacy, cannot always be voiced aloud or rendered into written language. To move beyond this horizon, this paper reimagines the approach known as collective memory work (Nenonene et al., 2021). Specifically, the focus of this work involves a self-study of the dynamics of memory in theory and in practice. Accordingly, this study attends to the shifts and mobility of cultural memories that occur when working as part of a collective. By interrogating the relations between what we remember individually and what emerges through mediation of memories with others, this work moves away from the astigmatism of empirical writing.

Author

• Ramon Vasquez, University of Minnesota