![Sample our Communication Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, 2013 & 2014 volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5927/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Information-Science2.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This article introduces emergent memory, a conceptual extension to rhetorics of public memory, to describe memory’s genesis in sites built without commemorative commitments. Examining Detroit’s “8 Mile Wall,” a site built to reinforce segregated housing, this project argues the rhetorical tenets of emergent memory present in this space. As a relic of segregated history, the wall symbolically recalls the city’s controversial past, but has recently been the subject of a local mural project to redefine the wall’s purpose. Some consider this a step toward reclamation, as it visually repositions the disturbing remnant. For others, the murals simply cannot overwrite troubling memories of the city’s discriminatory history. This essay uses emergent memory to describe how the wall’s complicated mnemonic legacy simultaneously harkens to a difficult history and how the mural additions use that same legacy to convey an optimistic future for Detroit and those marked by this urban space.
Notes
1 Elizabeth Baker and Matthew Schwartz, “In Detroit, A Mural Stands as a Reminder of the City’s ‘Segregation Wall,” NPR, 2017, http://www.npr.org/2017/07/22/538760677/in-detroit-a-colorful-mural-stands-as-a-reminder-of-the-citys-segregation-wall.
2 W. Kim Heron, “The Kiss, the Wall and Other True Tales,” Metro Times, 2002.
3 Sarah Hulett, “Racial, Regional Divide Still Haunts Detroit’s Progress,” NPR, 2012, http://www.npr.org/2012/09/11/160768981/racial-regional-divide-still-haunt-detroits-progress.
4 Baker and Schwartz, “In Detroit, A Mural Stands.”
5 Ibid.
6 Hulett, “Racial, Regional Divide.”
7 Ian Goodwin, “Theorizing Community as Discourse in Community Informatics: ‘Resistance Communities’ and Contested Technologies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (2011): 47–66.
8 For more on the role of public sites and performances shaping public identity, see Maurice Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73, no. 2 (1987): 133. Ian Goodwin’s work in “Theorizing Community” also contributes to our understanding as to how cultural objects and discourses define sense of community.
9 Renee Romano and Leigh Raiford, The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 137–44.
10 Laura McAtackney, “Peace Maintenance and Political Messages: The Significance of Walls during and after the Northern Irish ‘Troubles,” Journal of Social Archaeology 11 (2011): 77–98.
11 Kirt H. Wilson, “Interpreting the Discursive Field of the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Holt Street Address,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 8, no. 4 (2005): 299–326.
12 Theresa Donofrio, “Ground Zero and Place-making Authority: The Conservative Metaphors of 9/11 Families ‘Take Back the Memorial’ Rhetoric,” Western Journal of Communication 74, no. 2 (2010): 150–69.
13 Greg Dickinson and Giorgia Aiello, “Being Through There Matters: Materiality, Bodies, and Movement in Urban Communication Research,” International Journal of Communication 10 (2016): 1294–308.
14 Michael Middleton, Samantha Senda-Cook, and Danielle Endres, “Articulating Rhetorical Field Methods,” Western Journal of Communication 75, no. 4 (2011): 386–406.
15 Marita Sturken, Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 36–41; Andrew Jones, Memory and Material Culture (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 40.
16 McAtackney, “Peace Maintenance and Political Messages.”
17 Marouf Hasian and Rulon Wood, “Critical Museology, Colonial Communication, and the Gradual at The Royal Museum for Central Africa,” Western Journal of Communication 74, no. 2 (2010): 128–149.
18 Thomas Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 47–48.
19 Ibid., 268.
20 Scott Martelle, Detroit: A Biography (Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press, 2014), 19–21.
21 Joe T. Darden and Richard W. Thomas, Detroit: Race Riots, Racial Conflicts, and Efforts to Bridge the Racial Divide (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2013).
22 United States Commission on Civil Rights, Understanding Fair Housing (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1973).
23 Joe T. Darden, Richard C. Hill, June Thomas, and Richard Thomas, Detroit: Race and Uneven Development (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press), 67–91.
24 Sidney Fine, Violence in the Model City: The Cavanagh Administration, Race Relations, and the Detroit Riot of 1967 (East Lansing: MI: Michigan State University Press, 2007).
25 Phyllis Vine, One Man’s Castle: Clarence Darrow in Defense of the American Dream (New York: NY: HarperCollins, 2004).
26 Ibid.
27 Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 268.
28 David Maraniss, Once in a Great City (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2016), 39.
29 Eric King Watts, “Border Patrolling and Passing in Eminem’s 8 Mile,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 22, no. 3 (2005): 187–206.
30 Jeff Rice, Digital Detroit: Rhetoric and Space in the Age of the Network (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012).
31 Paul Harris, “Eight Miles of Murder,” The Guardian, April 2006, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/apr/16/usa.paulharris.
32 Maraniss, Once in a Great City.
33 Paul Clemens, Made in Detroit: A Memoir (New York, NY: Random House, 2006).
34 Watts, “Border Patrolling.”
35 Hulett, “Racial, Regional Divide.”
36 Vicky Cosstick, Belfast: Toward a City without Walls (Newtownards, UK: Colourpoint, 2015).
37 Denise Guerra, “In Detroit, A Colorful Mural Stands as a Reminder of the City’s Segregation Wall,” NPR, July 2017, http://wamc.org/post/detroit-colorful-mural-stands-reminder-citys-segregation-wall.
38 Maraniss, Once in a Great City.
39 These sentiments were conveyed to me on two separate occasions where I traveled to the wall and neighbors approached me to discuss my interest in the wall.
40 Carole Blair and Neil Michel, “Reproducing Civil Rights Tactics: The Rhetorical Performances of the Civil Rights Memorial,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30, no. 1 (2000): 31–55; Tamar Katriel, “Sites of Memory: Discourses of the Past in Israeli Pioneering Settlement Museums,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80, no. 1 (1994): 1–20.
41 John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
42 James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994).
43 Baker and Schwartz, “In Detroit, a Mural Stands.”
44 Guerra, “In Detroit, A Colorful Mural Stands.”
45 Maraniss, Once in a Great City.
46 These statistics are pulled from a census data website, most recently updated in 2015. Their database enables searches to specific regions and neighborhoods, allowing comparative statistics as well. See “Geo Data of Ferndale, MI,” datausa.io, https://datausa.io/profile/geo/ferndale-mi/ (accessed July 28, 2017).
47 Marge Sorge, “Blight Busters’ John George and his Determination to Rid Detroit of Blight,” The Detroit Hub, September, 2015).
48 Neal Rubin, “Wall Separating Black, White Detroit Gets Mural,” The Detroit News, 2006.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid.
51 Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (New York, NY: Picador Press, 2004), 10.
52 Baker and Schwartz, “In Detroit, a Mural Stands.”
53 Ibid.
54 Robin Schwartz, “Built to Separate Black and White Neighborhoods, the Wall Still Stands Today,” Detroit Jewish News, 15 January, 2017.
55 Paul Mullins, “The Ruins of Racism,” Archaeology and Material Culture (blog), February, 2017. https://paulmullins.wordpress.com/tag/detroit/
56 Hulett, “Racial, Regional Divide.”
57 Baker and Schwartz, “In Detroit, a Mural Stands.”
58 Jeff Karoub, “Wall that Once Divided Races in Detroit Remains, Teaches,” USA Today, May 2013, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/05/01/detroit-race-wall/2127165/.