Introduction: interrogating the memory landscape of higher education

ABSTRACT

This is the first part of a two-part forum called Interventions in Public Memory: Interrogating the Critical/Cultural Landscape of Higher Education, edited by Meredith M. Bagley. In this installment, scholar activists engage critical questions of public memory on their own higher education campuses, including relationships to the land, resistance to institutional memory, and tensions of “town and gown.” Contributors write their own experiences into the work of resisting dominant and/or anti-Black memory practices within higher education, with the aim of motivating colleagues for similar acts of intervention.

KEYWORDS:

• public memory
• resistance
• counter-narrative
• pedagogy
• critical university studies

Acknowledgments

As a forum we thank Dr. Robin M. Boylorn for the chance to bring these topics to you, and we hope you find them energizing. I personally thank Dr. Jessy Ohl for generous and generative initial conversations and Dr. Jason Black for initiating the UA counter-tour tradition. I also thank Dr. Autherine Juanita Lucy Foster, and all my Lucy Tour participants and collaborators over the years.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Carole Blair, “Contemporary US Memorial Sites as Exemplars of Rhetoric’s Materiality,” in Rhetorical Bodies, ed. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 16–57.

2 For parks, see Samantha Senda-Cook, “Materializing Tensions: How Maps and Trails Mediate Nature,” Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 7, no. 3 (2013): 355–71; for battlefields see Allison M. Prasch, “Reagan at Pointe du Hoc: Deictic Epideictic and the Persuasive Power of ‘Bringing Before the Eyes’,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 18, no. 2 (2015): 247–76; for toxic waste sites see Phaedra Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009); for the US/Mexico border see Robert DeChaine, “Introduction: For Rhetorical Border Studies,” in Border Rhetorics, ed. Robert DeChaine (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 1–18; and for indigenous territories see Tiara R. Na’puti, “Archipelagic Rhetoric: Remapping the Marianas and Challenging Militarization from ‘A Stirring Place’,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 16, no. 1 (2019): 4–25.

3 Other recent special issues that address similar topics include Southern Communication Journal 81, no. 4 (2016) on race and rhetoric (Lisa Corrigan, ed.), Southern Communication Journal 82, no. 4 (2017) on gender and public memory (Tasha Dubriwny and Kristen Poirot eds.), Howard Journal of Communication 28, no. 2 (2017) on civil rights memory (Christi Moss and Ronald Jackson eds.), and Memory Studies 12, no. 1 (2019) on joyful memory (Tia Sindbaek Anderson and Jessica Ortner eds.).

4 Rosa A. Eberly, “‘Everywhere You Go, It’s There’: Public Memory and the UT Tower Shootings,” in Framing Public Memory, ed. Kendall R. Phillips (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 65–88.

5 Patricia Davis, Laying Claim: African American Cultural Memory and Southern Identity (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2016).

6 Davis, Laying Claim, 19.

7 Cynthia D. Smith, “The Rhetoric of Campus Architecture,” Communication Teacher 30, no 1 (2016): 6–10. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17404622.2015.1102304; Anne C. Kretsinger-Harries, “Teaching Public Memory Through Analysis of Confederate Monument Controversies on College Campuses,” Communication Teacher 35, no. 1 (2020): 55–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/17404622.2020.1774629.

8 Jane Greer and Laurie Grobman, eds., Pedagogies of Public Memory: Teaching Writing and Rhetoric at Museums, Archives, and Memorials (New York: Routledge, 2016), 105–16. Related works that may interest readers include recent critical race literary and writing pedagogy studies such as: April Baker-Bell, Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy (New York: Routledge, 2020); Frankie Condon and Wonderful Faison, Eds., CounterStories from the Writing Center (Logan, UT: Utah State Press, 2022); Carla Espana and Luz Yadira Herrera, En Comunidad: Lessons for Centering the Voices and Experiences of Bilingual Latinx Students (London: Heinemann, 2020); Aja Y. Martinez, Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory (Champaign, IL: NCTE, 2020).

9 Carey Applegate and Cathy Rex, “Teaching Tourism in Jamaica: Developing Students’ Critical Consciousness and Intercultural Competence,” Intercultural Education 29, no. 1 (2018): 1–17. DOI: 10.1080/14675986.2017.1404782; Neil M. Coe and Fiona M. Smyth, “Students as Tour Guides: Innovation in Fieldwork Assessment,” Journal of Geography in Higher Education 34 no. 125–139 (2010). DOI: 10.1080/03098260902954095.

10 Shevaun E. Watson and Cathy Rex, “New Directions for Research: Bringing Together Public Memory, Early America, and Tourism Studies,” Public Memory, Race, and Heritage Tourism of Early America 1–17 (2021).

11 Examples of these works in a Southeastern context include Culpepper Clark, The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation’s Last Stand at the University of Alabama (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993); B. J. Hollars, Opening the Doors: The Desegregation of the University of Alabama and the Fight for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013); Earl Tilford, Turning the Tide: The University of Alabama in the 1960s (The University of Alabama Press, 2004); Melissa Kean, Desegregating Private Higher Education in the South: Duke, Emory, Rice, Tulane, and Vanderbilt (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2013); Robert Pratt, We Shall Not Be Moved: The Desegregation of The University of Georgia (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2002); Theodore D. Segal, Point of Reckoning: The Fight for Racial Justice at Duke University (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021); Rhondda R. Thomas, Call My Name, Clemson: Documenting the Black Experience in an American University Community. Humanities and Public Life (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020). Essay collections in this theme include Henrie Monteith Treadwell, Valinda W. Littlefield, Tyler D. Parry, and Robert Greene, II, Invisible No More: The African American Experience at the University of South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2021); Peter Wallenstein, Higher Education and the Civil Rights Movement: White Supremacy, Black Southerners, and College Campuses (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2008).

12 Stephen M Monroe, Heritage and Hate: Old South Rhetoric at Southern Universities (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2021).

13 Ersula J. Ore, Lynching Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity (Oxford, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2019); Louis M. Maraj, Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics (Logan, UT: Utah State Press, 2020).

14 Chakraborty is credited with initiation of the #CommunicationSoWhite hashtag and movement, along with scholars such as Bernadette Callafell, Mohan Dutta, Ragan Fox, Bryan McCann, Ashley Mack McCann, as well as many others. Dutta’s blog response to then-editor of Rhetoric & Public Affairs Martin Medhurst at the outset of the crisis provides a reminder (and lasting provocation) about the ways “merit” and “diversity” are often falsely placed into opposition: https://culture-centered.blogspot.com/2019/06/in-post-made-in-response-to-changes-to.html. For a full explication, see Special Issue of Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, 8:4 (Winter 2019) https://doi.org/10.1525/dcqr.2019.8.4.3.

15 Singh, Vineeta. “‘Never Waste a Good Crisis’: Critical University Studies during and after a Pandemic,” American Quarterly 73, no. 1 (2021): 181–93. doi:10.1353/aq.2021.0014. Singh provides an excellent genealogy of CUS, tracing its roots in critiques of neo-liberal market forces in the university, then “second wave” critiques from BIPOC scholars of color-blind universalizing of these first works, through to faculty-student collectives of “guerilla intellectuals”, to current works questioning ways universities actively co-construct their reputations as knowledge-production sites of freedom in crisis to warrant market-based policies and increasingly corporate management. The CUS phrase is credited to Heather Steffen, first published in a 2012 essay with her advisor Jeffrey J. Williams. As Singh concludes, CUS “remind[s] us that we do not have to concede the terms of our relationships to the university’s HR or PR departments. They invite us to create new vocabularies for our “campus communities” that do not obfuscate the university’s decision-making power as employer and landlord, or its embrace of marketplace logics.”

16 J. David Maxson, “‘Second Line to Bury White Supremacy’: Take ’Em Down Nola, Monument Removal, and Residual Memory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 1 (2020): 48–71; Carl Schlachte, “Material Inertia: The Sedimented Spatial Rhetoric of Public School Buildings,” Rhetoric Review 39, no. 3 (2020): 317–29. DOI: 10.1080/07350198.2020.1764762.

17 Kristan Poirot and Shevaun E. Watson, “Memories of Freedom and White Resilience: Place, Tourism, and Urban Slavery,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 45, no. 2 (2015): 91–116.

18 Tiara R. Na’puti and T. Jake Dionne, “Settler Colonialism on Display: Touring On-Campus Places of Public Memory to Teach Ideological Rhetorical Criticism,” Communication Teacher 35, no. 2 (2021): 114–21.

19 At the time of publication, I am aware of counter-narrative tour efforts at University of Alabama, University of Arkansas, University of Texas, Westchester University, University of Missouri, Furman University, Columbia, William & Mary, Clemson University, Elon College, Georgetown, University of North Carolina, University of Georgia, and University of Virginia. Student activists at Barnard/Columbia have compiled a Dis-Orientation Guide in zine form since at least 2002–03 that engages campus history/memory (see chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/http://www.campusactivism.org/server-new/uploads/disguide02.pdf). I am grateful to Brandon Inabinet and Allison Farzad-Phillips of Furman University and Hilary Green of Davidson College for sharing their compilation of counter-narrative tours.

20 Stephen A. King and Roger Gatchet, “Marking the Past: Civil Rights Tourism and the Mississippi Freedom Trail,” Southern Communication Journal 83, no. 2 (2018): 103–18.

21 A sampling of the excellent work produced by this interdisciplinary cluster includes: Jordan P. Brasher, Derek H. Alderman, and Joshua F. Inwood, “Applying Critical Race and Memory Studies to University Place Naming Controversies: Toward a Responsible Landscape Policy,” Papers in Applied Geography 3, no. 3–4 (2017): 292–307; Maureen A. Flint, “Racialized Retellings:(Un) Ma (r) king Space and Place on College Campuses,” Critical Studies in Education 62, no. 5 (2021): 559–74; or Joshua F. Inwood and Deborah G. Martin, “Whitewash: White Privilege and Racialized Landscapes at the University of Georgia,” Social & Cultural Geography 9, no. 4 (2008): 373–95. DOI: 10.1080/14649360802033882. The work of Tourism RESET (https://www.tourismreset.com/) is another resource for accessible reports and provocations on these questions.

22 April L. O’Brien, “Exclusionary Public Memory Documents: Orientating Historical Marker Texts within a Technical Communication Framework,” Technical Communication Quarterly 31, no. 2 (2022): 111–25. DOI: 10.1080/10572252.2021.1977851.

23 Brenda Helmbrecht, “Revisiting Missions: Decolonizing Public Memories in California,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 49, no. 5 (2019): 470–94. DOI: 10.1080/02773945.2019.1668048; Na’Puti and Dionne, 2021.

24 For two studies particularly rooted in campus settler colonialism politics, see Danielle Endres, “A Critical Rhetorical History of the Utes Nickname,” in Decolonizing Native American Rhetoric: Communicating Self-Determination, eds. Casey Ryan Kelly and Jason Edward Black (New York: Peter Lang, 2018), 180– 202; Robin Starr Minthorn and Christine A. Nelson, “Colonized and Racist Indigenous Campus Tour,” Journal of Critical Scholarship on Higher Education and Student Affairs 4, no. 1 (2018): 73–88. https://ecommons.luc.edu/jcshesa/vol4/iss1/4/.

25 For an account of mascot protests within a sport setting, see Andy C. Billings and Jason Edward Black, Mascot Nation: The Controversy Over Native American Representations in Sports (Champaign, IL: Univ of Illinois Press, 2018).

26 Justine Wells, “Monumentality, Ruination, and the Milieux of Memory: Lessons from W. E. B. Du Bois,” Western Journal of Communication, October (2022) (2022). DOI: 10.1080/10570314.2022.2118552.

27 Wells, Justine, “Monumentality, Ruination, and the Milieux of Memory.”