The Racial Politics of Public Memorials and Grassroots Remembrance

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

"If American empire requires the foundational and ongoing violence of coloniality and racial captivity, it also sanctions the continuous assault of oppositional memory, subaltern histories, and alternative modes of place-making. This is most readily apparent in the concerted effort by the white supremacist far-right to thwart what is known and knowable about the violence of the U.S. empire and how it can be contested. As mounting social and political crises reveal cleavages in the American hegemonic order, struggles over how to remember and narrate the violent political project of the United States are increasingly important to our collective pursuit of liberation and sovereignty. Our proposed panel, “The Racial Politics of Public Memorials and Grassroots Remembrance,” begins with this premise and engages how race, space, and memory are used to widen and or undermine State power.

The panel reaches across different geographies of the U.S. (e.g., Ferguson, Missouri; Berkeley, California; U.S. Virgin Islands; Puerto Rico) to explore persistent struggles over cultural, spatial, and historical memory. Particularly, we focus on the prevalence of grassroots efforts to commemorate people, communities, and geographies subjected to spectacular racial and imperial violence. Collectively, we highlight how public and or institutional sites of memory (e.g., building names, statues, street names, etc.) stage political contests over what kinds of subjects, people, and communities deserve commemoration and what kinds of memory or history deserve preservation.

Each panelist approaches these questions in local and specific contexts. Rashad Arman Timmons engages the racial politics of infrastructural violence, spatial memory, and commemoration in Ferguson, Missouri, where police forces killed a Black, 18-year-old named Michael Brown, Jr. in August 2014. Caleb Dawson, Ellen Berrey, and Alex Hanna consider how college student activists in the U.S. and Canada stage protests to memorialize people subjected to spectacular violence and examine the grassroots tactics the activists use to expand and correct our understanding of who warrants honor. Ayana Omilade Flewellen queries the politics of cultural heritage sites in the U.S. Virgin Islands and explicates how federal agencies use these spaces to marginalize Afro-Caribbean histories. Finally, Sofía Martínez Rivera demonstrates how Memoria (De)colonial, a grassroots, decolonial art and research collective, uses insurgent spatial pedagogies, digital mapping, and “devisos/detours” to reinterpret dominant histories of Puerto Rico. Together, these presentations reveal how, in the wake of normalized violation, communities unearth obscured histories and enact grassroots practices of memorialization to undermine the hegemony of Western imperialism and radically transform the meanings of space."

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Haunting Interruptions: Race, Infrastructural Violence, and Spatial Memory in Ferguson, Missouri, USA - Rashad Arman Timmons, University of California-Santa Barbara

• The Expansive and Corrective Power of Grassroots Memorialization: Lessons from College Student Activists in the U.S. and Canada - Caleb E Dawson, University of California-Santa Barbara; Ellen Berrey, University of Toronto; Alex Hanna; Kendal T Kandasamy, University of Toronto

• Interrupting colonial narratives: Public Humanities and Participatory Pedagogies in Puerto Rico - Sofía Martínez Rivera, Memoria (De)colonial

• The Politics of Heritage in the US Virgin Islands: Reclaiming Afro-Caribbean Histories on Landscapes of Contestation in St. Croix - Ayana Flewellen, Stanford University

Chairs

• Amaka Okechukwu, Johns Hopkins University

• Jovan S. Lewis, University of California, Berkeley

Comment

• Tianna Bruno, University of California Berkeley

Biographical Information

Dr. Amaka Okechukwu is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. She is an interdisciplinary scholar engaged in research on social movements, race, Black communities, urban politics, and digital humanities. She has worked in public history and community engagement roles in Brooklyn, NY. Her current book project concerns grassroots organizing and Black social life in Brooklyn during the 1970s and 1980s.
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Jovan Scott Lewis is Professor of Geography and the Haas Distinguished Chair in Economic Disparities at the University of California, Berkeley. A critical human geographer and anthropologist, he examines the intersections of Black geographies, racial capitalism, reparative justice, and economic inequality. His research focuses on how Black communities in the Caribbean and the United States navigate the enduring legacies of slavery, colonialism, and economic dispossession, with particular attention to reparations as a means of addressing structural disparities.
Lewis is the author of Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), which explores the informal economies of Jamaican lottery scammers and the ethical, class, and racial dimensions of their practices. His second book, Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa (Duke University Press, 2022), examines the economic afterlives of racialized violence and the possibilities for Black restoration in the face of persistent inequality. He is also co-editor of The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity (Duke University Press, 2023), which brings together interdisciplinary perspectives on Black spatial thought.
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Tianna Bruno is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the intersection of Black geographies, critical environmental justice, political ecology, and critical physical geography. Through her work, she aims to foreground Black life, sense of place, and relationships to the environment within spaces of present-day environmental injustice. Her research also highlights the mutual experiences of degradation and survival between subaltern communities and their surrounding ecologies through the integration of Black geographies and critical physical geography, specifically analyzing trees. This research is currently focused on Texas, and will soon expand to various locations across the Black diaspora. Tianna’s previous work broadly related to environmental justice has been published in Progress in Environmental Geography, Professional Geographer, and the Annals of the American Association of Geography, among other journals, and a book project currently underway.
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Rashad Arman Timmons (he/him) is a community builder, keyboardist, writer, scholar, and Black feminist educator from Detroit, Michigan, the ancestral and present homelands of the Anishinaabe. His research employs archival methods, infrastructural ethnography, and textual analysis to explore the relationship between race, policing, and the built environment in the midwestern United States. Rashad’s current book project investigates how racialized infrastructural violence reanimates conditions of confinement and unfreedom in Ferguson, Missouri—the St. Louis suburb where Black teenager Michael Brown Jr. was executed by police in 2014. Rashad is currently a University of California (UC) President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Black Studies at UC Santa Barbara and serves as a Race and Digital Justice Fellow with UCLA’s Center for Race and Digital Justice. He earned his Ph.D. and M.A. in African American and African Diaspora Studies with a designated emphasis in New Media from UC Berkeley. In conversation with his scholarly work, Rashad serves and organizes with the Michael Brown Sr. Chosen for Change Organization, a family-led nonprofit devoted to uplifting the life and legacy of Michael "Mike Mike" Brown Jr. In this role, Rashad leads public history and community engagement projects to preserve Black history in Ferguson and St. Louis. He also writes grants to support the Brown family’s healing and racial justice programs throughout the St. Louis metropolitan area.
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Caleb E. Dawson (he/him) is a Black feminist sociologist, dancer, and community organizer from Federal Way, Washington. His research examines how and why gendered racial inequality persists in US higher education and the structural challenges faced by those laboring to create change. Spanning pressing issues from student loan debt to racialized equity labor, Dawson leverages Black feminist theory and qualitative methods to advance our understandings of antiblackness and the paradoxes of inclusion. Moreover, he is dedicated to reimagining and redistributing state-sanctioned resources to build life-affirming institutions and sustain state-forsaken peoples. Dawson is a FAJI Fellow with Scholars for Social Justice, an affiliate of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, and a member of the Higher Education Race and the Economy Lab at UC Merced. After earning his PhD and MA in Education through the Critical Studies of Race, Class, and Gender cluster at UC Berkeley, he completed a UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at UC Merced.
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Dr. Ellen Berrey is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto as well as an affiliated scholar of the American Bar Foundation and a faculty affiliate of the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). Her research investigates how organizations and movements advance, and thwart, progressive social change in the United States and Canada. She is particularly curious about how cultural ideals – diversity, fairness, sustainability – get invoked, contested, and institutionalized in law and organizations. Her current projects examine campus protest and protest management by university administrations and police (with Alex Hanna and Caleb Dawson) and government responses to an anti-sustainability movement motivated by a conspiracy theory.
Dr. Berrey has written two award-winning books on the politics of racism, law, and American culture: The Enigma of Diversity: The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice (U of Chicago Press 2015) and, with Robert Nelson and Laura Beth Nielsen, Rights on Trial: How Workplace Discrimination Law Perpetuates Inequality (U of Chicago Press 2017). Her research on campus protest, affirmative action in admissions, corporate diversity management, and sustainability law is published in multi-disciplinary and sociology journals such as Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Du Bois Review, Law & Society Review, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Socius, and Theory & Society. Her scholarship has been profiled in The New Yorker and reported in the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Politico, and other news outlets.
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Dr. Alex Hanna is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). A sociologist by training, her work centers on the data used in new computational technologies, and the ways in which these data exacerbate racial, gender, and class inequality. She also works in the area of social movements, focusing on the dynamics of anti-racist campus protest in the US and Canada. She holds a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics and a BA in Sociology from Purdue University, and an MS and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Hanna is the co-author of The AI Con (Harper, 2025), a book about AI and the hype around it. With Emily M. Bender, she also runs the Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 series, where they tear apart AI hype for a live audience online on Twitch and her podcast. She has published widely in top-tier venues across the social sciences, including the journals Mobilization, American Behavioral Scientist, and Big Data & Society, and top-tier computer science conferences such as CSCW, FAccT, and NeurIPS. Dr. Hanna serves as a Senior Fellow at the Center for Applied Transgender Studies and sits on the advisory board for the Human Rights Data Analysis Group. She is also recipient of the Wisconsin Alumni Association’s Forward Award, has been included on FastCompany’s Queer 50 (2021, 2024) List and Business Insider’s AI Power List, and has been featured in the Cal Academy of Sciences New Science exhibit, which highlights queer and trans scientists of color.
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Ayana Omilade Flewellen (they/she) is a Black Feminist, an archaeologists, an artist scholar and a storyteller. As a scholar of anthropology and African and African Diaspora Studies, Flewellen’s intellectual genealogy is shaped by critical theory rooted in Black feminist epistemology and pedagogy. This epistemological backdrop not only constructs the way they design, conduct and produce their scholarship but acts as foundational to how she advocates for greater diversity within the field of archaeology and within the broader scope of academia. Flewellen is the co-founder and current Board Chair of the Society of Black Archaeologists and sits on the Board of Diving With A Purpose. They are an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. Her research and teaching interests address Black Feminist Theory, historical archaeology, memory, maritime heritage conservation, public and community-engaged archaeology, processes of identity formations, and representations of slavery and its afterlives. Flewellen has been featured in National Geographic, Science Magazine, PBS and CNN; and regularly presents her work at institutions including The National Museum for Women in the Arts.
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Sofía Martínez Rivera (she/her) is the coordinator of Memoria Decolonial’s (Des)vío/(De)tours project and lead workshop facilitator since 2022. She completed her bachelor's degree in Art History and Global Liberal Studies at New York University (2022). Her thesis, “What we do with what we see: Decolonizing the POC body,” demystifies the representation of Black bodies in the arts by examining the “white, male, colonial gaze” in these depictions. Her interest in decolonial practices, participatory methodologies, and the public humanities has led her to collaborate in projects such as Bridging the Divides: Post-disaster futures, Escritura Pública, and others. In addition to her humanitarian and research work, she is a poet and writer, and owns a curatorial shop for antiques and second-hand items. Her creative work can be found in Acentos Review.