Memory as everyday critical praxis

ABSTRACT

Successful campaigns to remove Confederate monuments from U.S. campuses have been instrumental in restructuring these spaces to better reflect our diverse communities and foster the sense of belonging important to the well-being of all students. Nevertheless, these campaigns also obscure the more mundane ways in which hegemonic historical narratives continue to inform the memories students develop inside and outside of the classroom. I thus propose a model of everyday critical praxis wherein we integrate resistant historical narratives into our pedagogy in ways that leverage the rhetorical influence of the more quotidian memory practices that inform our daily lives.

KEYWORDS:

• Quotidian
• memory
• multiculturalism
• critical praxis
• social justice

Notes

1 Paul Ginsborg, The Politics of Everyday Life: Making Choices, Changing Lives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005)

2 Susan Svrluga, “As Colleges Grapple with Racist Legacies, a Monument at Ole Miss Will Finally Go.” Washington Post, June 19, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/06/19/colleges-grapple-with-racist-legacies-monument-ole-miss-will-finally-go

3 See Dionne, Hatfield, Khetani & Metcalf and also Monroe in Forum I of this special forum for more about statue removal efforts at the University of Arkansas and University of Mississippi, respectively.

4 Svrluga (2020). Washington & Lee University is a notable example.

5 Connections between Confederate memorialization and racial violence have recently been subjected to academic inquiry, with Henderson et al. (2021) offering a quantitative analysis that found a correlation between such memorializations at the county level and lynching. See Myshia Henderson, Samuel Powers, Michele Claibourn, and Sophie Trawalter (2021). Lynching in the American South: An Empirical Examination. PNAS 118(42). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2103519118

6 David A. Love, “America’s Student Loan Crisis Stems from a War on Education as a Public Good,” Washington Post, December 29, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/12/29/history-student-loan-debt/

7 Tina Harris, “Dismantling the Trifecta of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: The Illusion of

Heterogeneity,” in Confronting Equity and Inclusion Efforts on Campus, ed. Hannah Oliha-Donaldson (New York: Routledge, 2020), 34–56.

8 Michael Eric Dyson, Open Mike: Reflections on Philosophy, Race, Sex, Culture, and Religion (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2003), 119.

9 Please see Gallagher & Renner’s essay in this special forum for an example of this recovery work.

10 It is important to note that Brown’s discussion foregrounds transitional societies, of which the U.S. is not one per se. However, the country’s enduring racial divisions and the accompanying conflicts over memory share important parallels to the memory work performed in transitional societies. See Kris Brown, “What It Was Like to Live Through a Day: Transitional Justice and the Memory of the Everyday in a Divided Society,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 6, no. 3 (2012): 444–466.

11 Sidonie Smith, S. and Julia Watson, eds. Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 15.

12 Jasmine T. Austin and Jill A. Edy. (2022), “Narrating the Past on Fairer Terms: Approaches to Building Multicultural Public Memories,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 39 no. 4 (2022): 276–290.

13 Christen A. Smith, Erica L. Williams, Imani A. Wadud, Whitney N.L. Pirtle, and the Cite Black Women Collective, “Cite Black Women: A Critical Praxis (A Statement),” Feminist Anthropology 2021.

14 Leigh Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Andrea N. Williams, “Cultivating Black Visuality: The Controversy over Cartoons in the Indianapolis Freeman,” American Periodicals 25, no. 2 (2015): 124–138; Melissa Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); Deborah Willis, Posing Beauty: African American Images 1980s to the Present (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009); Deborah Willis-Thomas, and Carla Williams, The Black Female Body: A Photographic History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002).

15 Smith et al., 2.

16 Eliza Fawcett and Anemona Hartocollis, “Florida Gives Reasons for Rejecting A.P. African American Studies Class,” New York Times (January 21, 2023), https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/21/us/florida-ap-african-american-studies.html

17 Janai Nelson, “Ron DeSantis Wants to Erase Black History. Why?” New York Times, January 31, 2023, para 5. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/31/opinion/ron-desantis-black-history.html