What We Do With What Remains: The Politics of Reimagining the Past and Resignifying the Present

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

This Visual Culture Caucus-sponsored panel brings together various attempts to use the visual and material traces of American history to challenge dominant narratives about the events of the past and the meaning of present crises. By examining the ways in which different communities in the US have sought to “make memory matter,” to borrow a phrase from Lisa Saltzman, or make matter into memory, these papers ask us to look closely at the social implications of practices of classification, collection, preservation, performance, and display that are all too often taken for granted even as they make the past perceptible. In so doing, this panel reminds us that “America” is the product of memory work, and that any effort to meaningfully reimagine “America” as object must leverage these commemorative practices.

In her paper, “‘Combining Our Mutual Interest, Knowledge, and Abilities’: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and Civil War Reenactments, 1980-2017,” Anne Boyd examines Civil War reenactments involving the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) in order to ask questions about the link between the “Civil War reenactment craze” and US empire building in the Middle East. Hadley Howes, in their paper, “Violence Beyond Sims: White Aesthetic Victory and Monumental Public Art,” explores the “growing movement against memorializing heroes of the American Empire.” Analyzing the campaign to remove and replace a monument to J. Marion Sims, a 19th c. physician whose research involved “brutal experimentation on his enslaved assistants”, Howes argues that the “counter-monument movement must go further than simply toppling figures made of stone and bronze.” Rather, Howes contends, it is necessary to think harder about what goes up in their place, lest we fail to “disentangle the intimate and insidious bonds between systemic violence and the field of representation.” Both McKenzie Clarke and Josh Massey investigate the way the so-called waste or refuse of empire can be used to remember and resist. In her paper, “After Birth: A Visual Anal/ysis of Black Women’s Refusal,” Clarke places feminist theories of “refusal” alongside music videos from the rapper Megan Thee Stallion’s latest album MEGAN in order to explore the manner in which “waste sites” appear in “black women’s visual and literary art” as the grounds of oppositional practice. Finally, Massey’s paper, “One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Treasure”: Identifying A Politics of Creative Reuse,” considers art world responses to assemblages by Hawkins Bolden, a Tenesseen artist who used “food packaging” and “construction debris” to make scarecrows for his yard. Massey explores the tension between his own reading of these constructions as political statements conveying “aesthetic and ethics of reuse” at odds with American consumerist culture, on the one hand, and art world attempts to frame these works as instances of “Black ‘vernacular’” art with “immaterial” value, on the other.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• “‘Combining Our Mutual Interest, Knowledge, and Abilities’: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and Civil War Reenactments, 1980-2017” - Anne Boyd, University of Texas - Rio Grande Valley

• "Violence Beyond Sims: White Aesthetic Victory and Monumental Public Art" - Hadley Howes, Queen's University

• “After Birth: A Visual Anal/ysis of Black Women’s Refusal” - McKenzie Clarke

• “'One Man’s Trash Is Another Man’s Treasure': Identifying A Politics of Creative Reuse" - Joshua Massey, Bard Graduate Center

Chair

• Carmen M Merport Quiñones, Oberlin College

Biographical Information

Anne Boyd is a PhD candidate in the American Studies Program at Boston University. She is
interested in Civil War memory from World War II through present day, as seen through a variety
of physical representations including monuments, school-naming practices, and war re-
enactments. Her dissertation is primarily focused on how the Lost Cause developed outside of
the South, and how heritage organizations such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy
adjusted their messaging across time and space. This work sits at the intersection between
history, material and visual culture, and popular memory. Anne earned her MA in American
Studies from Boston University in 2022, and her BA in American Culture and Political Science
from the University of Michigan in 2020.

Hadley Howes works from the position of a white, queer, trans, settler, artist, scholar, educator
and organiser based in T’karonto. Their research interests at the intersections of abolitionist and
aesthetic practices, critical archival practices, (counter-)monument and art in urban spaces is
informed by their professional experience creating public art and their extensive international
exhibition history as a visual artist working in research-rich, site-responsive and multimedia
installation. Hadley has over twenty years experience exhibiting and performing at international
venues including the 4th Marrakech Biennale, the 19th Biennale of Sydney, the Taipei Fine Arts
Museum, Le Centre National d'Art Contemporain de Grenoble, Mass MoCA, Kunstwerke Berlin,
Witte de With (now Milly) Rotterdam and the National Gallery of Canada. Their first permanent
public artwork, Garden of Future Follies, was commissioned by Waterfront Toronto and installed
in Toronto’s Canary District in the spring of 2016. Recent publications include “The State of the
World: Abolitionist Reading Practice” (RCL: Journal of Communication and Languages:
Decolonizing Visuality – Looks, Consciousness, Ways of Thinking and Acting, 2023) and “Even
Now the Sun: Monuments to Impermanence” (Public Journal 64: Beyond Unsettling –
Methodologies for Decolonial Futures, 2022). Hadley is currently dedicated to collective
engagement and co-creation, art and social justice, and studying conflict resolution, community
self-defence and Filipino Martial Arts. As a student researcher for the Archive/Counter-Archive
research-creation project (led by Janine Marchessault), Hadley is developing a methodology for
an abolitionist archive based in Katarokwi/Kingston to house counter-narratives to the carceral
tourism of the prison capital of Canada. They are a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at Queen’s
University, Katarokwi, on Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabek territory.

McKenzie Clarke (she/her) is an independent scholar who works at the intersection of black feminist
theory, film studies, literature, postcolonial studies, and feminist psychoanalysis. She has her BA in
English from Spelman College.

Joshua Massey is a doctoral candidate at Bard Graduate Center in New York City, where they
study American decorative arts and material culture. Their dissertation explores the yard
environments of “self-taught” Black artists in the American South and the ways in which such
spaces were encountered, interpreted, documented, collected, and preserved by White
professionals from the 1980s to the present. Massey holds a master’s degree in decorative arts,
design history, and material culture from Bard Graduate Center and a bachelor’s degree in
American Studies and English/Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. Massey is associate curator of This Is Not: Aldwyth in Retrospect, a travelling
retrospective exhibition of the collage and assemblage artist’s seventy-year career, displayed at
the Gregg Museum of Art & Design in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the Greenville County
Museum of Art in Greenville, South Carolina. They are also the principal essayist for the
exhibition’s catalogue. Massey is editor of Wordsmithing: The Spoken Art of Lonnie Holley, an
in-progress collection of the artist’s verbal performances, completed in collaboration with the
late Bernard Herman and Holley himself. They are the 2023 recipient of the Sybil Brenner
Bernstein Endowed Scholarship at Bard Graduate Center, a Beinecke Scholar, and an Eagle
Scout. Massey is also a published poet whose works appear in Alien Magazine, Defunct
Magazine, and Petrichor.