Material Rhetoric, Public Memory, and the Post-It Note

Abstract

When it opened, the American Civil War Center (ACWC) at Historic Tredegar became home to the first museum exhibit to tell the story of the Civil War from the perspectives of its three central stakeholders: Unionists, Confederates, and African Americans. This article explores the ways in which the ACWC capitalizes upon the materiality of the post-it note, functioning as a public visitor guestbook, to configure and simultaneously to delineate the bounds of a national “imagined community.” I argue that this configuring process largely inhibits the productive possibilities for what Susan Crane has called a “distortion” of visitor expectation. In disciplining what Crane terms an “excess” of memory, the ACWC broadly, and the post-it note specifically, upholds the legitimacy of the museum as an institution of public memory.

Notes

Anders Björkvall and Anna-Malin Karlsson, “The Materiality of Discourses and the Semiotics of Materials: A Social Perspective on the Meaning Potentials of Written Texts and Furniture,” Semiotica 187, no. 1/4 (2011): 146.

The American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar, The Center, http://www.tredegar.org/american-civil-war-center.aspx (accessed January 23, 2014).

Marie Tyler-McGraw, “Southern Comfort Levels: Race, Heritage Tourism, and the Civil War in Richmond,” in Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory, ed. James Oliver Horton and Louis E. Horton (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 157.

I use the phrase “memory places” in quotes to suggest, drawing from the work of Blair, Dickinson, and Ott, that such sites “propose[s] a specific kind of relationship between past and present that may offer a sense of sustained and sustaining communal identification”; Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian Ott, eds., Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 27.

On the usability of memory, see Barbie Zelizer, “Reading the Past Against the Grain: The Shape of Memory Studies,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12 (1995): 214–239.

Tyler-McGraw, “Southern Comfort Levels,” 165.

Douglas Crimp, On the Museum's Ruins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 48.

Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7–24.

Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press), 9.

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1986; repr., London: Verso, 2006).

Carole Blair, “Contemporary U.S. Memorial Sites as Exemplars of Rhetoric's Materiality,” in Rhetorical Bodies, ed. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 23. For more on materiality and rhetorical enactments, see Kenneth S. Zagacki and Victoria J. Gallagher, “Rhetoric and Materiality in the Museum Park at the North Carolina Museum of Art,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no. 2 (2009): 171–191.

Alon Confino, “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method,” The American Historical Review 102, no. 5 (1997): 1395.

Blair, “Contemporary U.S. Memorial Sites,” 30.

Andre Malraux as cited in Crimp, On the Museum's Ruins, 58.

The American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar, The Center, http://www.tredegar.org/american-civil-war-center.aspx.

Susan A. Crane, “Memory, Distortion, and History in the Museum,” History and Theory 36, no. 4 (1997): 44.

Ibid., 47.

These three resources are among those noted by Bjorkvall and Karlsson in their essay: Bjorkvall and Karlsson, “The Materiality of Discourses,” 148–153.

Joan Waugh, “Ulysses S. Grant, Historian,” in The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture, eds. Alice Fahs and Joan Waugh (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 15–16.

Jonathan I. Leib, “Separate Times, Shared Spaces: Arthur Ashe, Monument Avenue and the Politics of Richmond, Virginia's Symbolic Landscape,” Cultural Geographies 9 (2002): 286.

For more on the controversy surrounding the placement of the Arthur Ashe statue, see Leib, “Separate Times, Shared Spaces,” 286–312.

Lawrence J. Prelli, “Rhetorics of Display: An Introduction,” in Rhetorics of Display, ed. Lawrence J. Prelli (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), 14.

Tyler-McGraw, “Southern Comfort Levels,” 150.

David Lowenthal, “Identity, Heritage, and History,” in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John Gillis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 41.

Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 6.

Rosenzweig and Thelen, The Presence of the Past, 32.

Lowenthal, “Identity, Heritage, and History,” 41.

Ibid., 44.

See for a summary of these debates, Carolyn Kitch, Pennsylvania in Public Memory: Reclaiming the Industrial Past (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2012), 4–8.

Victoria J. Gallagher, “Memory as Social Action: Cultural Projection and Generic Form in Civil Rights Memorials,” in New Approaches to Rhetoric, eds. Patricia A. Sullivan and Steven R. Goldzwig (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003), 163.

Lowenthal as cited in Kitch, Pennsylvania in Public Memory, 5.

This is the subtitle of James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton's edited volume Slavery and Public History.

Lowenthal, “Identity, Heritage, and History,” 46.

Ibid., 46.

For examples of studies interrogating how the meaning of memory sites reflects presentist interests, see, for instance, V. William Balthrop, Carole Blair, and Neil Michel, “The Presence of the Present: Hijacking ‘The Good War’?” Western Journal of Communication 74, no. 2 (2010): 170–207 ; Barbara A. Biesecker, “Remembering World War II: The Rhetoric and Politics of National Commemoration at the Turn of the 21st Century,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88, no. 4 (2002): 393–409.

The American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar, “The Story,” http://www.tredegar.org/civil_war_tour_va.aspx (accessed April 6, 2015).

Blair, Dickinson, and Ott, Places of Public Memory, 27.

The American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar, “The Story,” http://www.tredegar.org/civil_war_tour_va.aspx.

This is a critique discussed by Crimp, On the Museum's Ruins, 18.

Ibid., 18–19.

Victoria J. Gallagher, “Remembering Together: Rhetorical Integration and the Case of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial,” Southern Communication Journal 60 (1995): 110.

Andrew J. Torget, “‘In the Cause of Liberty,’ The American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar, Richmond, Va. http://www.tredegar.org/,” Journal of American History 94, no. 3 (2007): 895.

This is one of the features of postmodern memorializing. See Carole Blair, Martha S. Jeppeson, and Enrico Pucci, Jr., “Public Memorializing in Postmodernity: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial as Prototype,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77, no. 3 (1991): 270.

Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, and Eric Aoki, “Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting: The Reverent Eye/I at the Plains Indian Museum,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3, no. 1 (2006): 27–47.

See Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki, “Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting,” 28–29, on rhetorics of reverence.

The ACWC Feedback Wall, August 2012, ACWC Archives, Richmond.

The ACWC Feedback Wall, December 2012, ACWC Archives, Richmond.

The ACWC Feedback Wall, April 2012, ACWC Archives, Richmond.

The ACWC Feedback Wall, December 2012, ACWC Archives.

Ibid.

The ACWC Feedback Wall, January 2013, ACWC Archives, Richmond.

The ACWC Feedback Wall, July 2012, ACWC Archives.

The ACWC Feedback Wall, December 2012, ACWC Archives.

Ibid.

Ibid.

The ACWC Feedback Wall, September 2012, ACWC Archives, Richmond.

The ACWC Feedback Wall, July 2012, ACWC Archives, Richmond.

The ACWC Feedback Wall, August 2012, ACWC Archives, Richmond.

See Rosenzweig and Thelen, The Presence of the Past, 105–109.

The ACWC Feedback Wall, June–July 2009, ACWC Archives, Richmond.

Ibid. Emphasis in the original.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Sex and the City Transcript, Season 6, Episode 7, http://www.satctranscripts.com/2008/08/sex-and-city-season-6-episode-7.html#.Ux9bmeddUQQ (accessed March 11, 2014).

The ACWC Feedback Wall, July 2012, ACWC Archives, Richmond.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki, “Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting,” 27–47.

The ACWC Feedback Wall, August 2009-February 2010, ACWC Archives, Richmond.

The ACWC Feedback Wall, November 2012, ACWC Archives, Richmond.

The ACWC Feedback Wall, July 2012, ACWC Archives, Richmond.

The ACWC Feedback Wall, April 2011, ACWC Archives, Richmond.

Ibid.

The ACWC Feedback Wall, August 2011, ACWC Archives.

Prelli, “Rhetorics of Displays: An Introduction,” 14.

The ACWC Feedback Wall, November 2012, ACWC Archives, Richmond.

The ACWC Feedback Wall, April–May 2010, ACWC Archives, Richmond.

For more on the implications of rhetorics of progress and reconciliation, see Victoria J. Gallagher, “Memory and Reconciliation in the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 2, no. 2 (1999): 303–320.

The ACWC Feedback Wall, November 2012, ACWC Archives, Richmond.

The ACWC Feedback Wall, July 2011, ACWC Archives, Richmond.

The ACWC Feedback Wall, October 2012, ACWC Archives, Richmond.

The ACWC Feedback Wall, July 2011, ACWC Archives, Richmond.