Return without Redemption: Commemoration, Race, and Retracing Democratic Futures

• In Event: Poster Session: Foundations of Political Theory I

Abstract

Part of democratic participation is the shared and contested narration of what is valued or should be protected. This requires the collective negotiation of historical symbols, various kinds of mnemonic devices or artifacts, and processes of construction and reconstruction in the establishing meaningful political participation. Practices of memory, temporally-mediated contestation of cultural signs and symbols, seems to offer pathways to recovering historical narrations as a key to redeeming otherwise destabilized political or cultural institutions.

However, this paper means to investigate a critical assumption of this “memory turn”: that remembering the past underwrites a relationship of “social catharsis—that the truth about the past will… bring reconciliation” (Margalit 2004). Sarah Clift (2013) helpfully unpacks this assumption about “recuperation of the past.” Public calls “to remember” are often invoked in ways that ignore the “discontinuous moments” of exclusion or dispossession that are necessary to ensure memories can trace a demonstrable line between the past through to a desired future. So, this raises the question: when we remember the past to redeem our institutions or society, how should we characterize the work of this relationship, and in what ways does it reproduce boundaries of foreclosure? How do these ways of remembering bind us to senses of political belonging or enable radically different futures? I argue that reimagining this relationship to the past, beyond notions of redemption or recovery, is critical to deploy practices of memory towards democratic ends. Embracing practices of memory which enable recurring confrontations, not to sustain the past as a counterweight that “haunts” the present, but to enact a disrupted sensibility of “return” to the present, offers potential to think otherwise about democratic futures.

My paper focuses these questions on commemorative efforts to publically acknowledge loss. Specifically, I look at three different “genres” of memorializing Hurricane Katrina: The Hurricane Katrina Memorial meditative garden and mausoleum in the Charity Hospital Cemetery, Spike Lee’s docu-requiem "When The Levees Broke", and Claudia Rankine’s lyric poetry "Citizen". In general, commemoration practices emphasize how a single event fits into a diverse array of collective memories, redeeming moments of social rupture through emotional tropes of human finitude. This is coupled with narratives of resilience, often narrated in terms of rescue or self-sacrifice, written in terms of humanitarian commonality; “humanity,” in this sense, serves as the dominant signifier of order and meaning. Rather than returning to sites of confrontation or otherwise disrupting norms meant to stabilize regimes of inequality, these popular narrative refrains of resilience, unity, and hope sits within a wider narrative project of “progress,” one of an inclusive community obligated to preserve what is self-evidently valuable, which is to say “morally worthy,” ideas and persons.

And yet, in each of my examples, the racialized loss and betrayal at the heart of Katrina troubles any efforts at valorizing loss in the name of civic unity or the self-evident construction of “humanity” or “progress”. Joseph Winters (2016) puts well how public commemoration conceal loss: “the pressure to speak and think coherently falters in the face of particular expressions of torment. Identity and thinking cannot manage and resolve incoherence and ambivalence without ‘talking us out of suffering’”. The harm of repeating the conventions of commemoration enfolds and subordinates experiences of loss under the legibility of progress, rather than relying on “tension-filled constellations” of memories, dulls the aesthetic and political possibilities for undoing oppression.

While the meditative garden falls into these hegemonic commemorative tropes, Lee’s film expresses the concentric circles of collective memories of "the storm", invested in contrasts and confrontation, and told by those present and images of abandoned houses of those displaced; the layering of sounds and symbols draw lines between Katrina and historical exposures of black communities to the everyday-ness of state violence. In a related yet different form, Rankine’s work is not addressed to New Orleans, or a particular geographical setting or disaster-moment at all, but rather a wider meditation across a temporal sketching of black precarity of which Katrina is a part; tracing media accounts across various instances of anti-black violence, she challenges the whitened terms of citizenship by reconsiders how belonging, which is to say remembering, can potentially take place. In exploring the range of expressive challenges offered by diverse approaches to commemoration, I am exploring how these practices trace memories of loss in and through institutionalized regimes of racial violence and in what ways these practices produce spaces for holding a vital, yet fragile, “return” to the present.

Author

• Matthew D Frierdich, University of Virginia