Monumentality, Ruination, and the Milieux of Memory: Lessons from W. E. B. Du Bois

Abstract

This essay examines memorial style as a rhetorical “milieu” in which geographies of race and racism are constructed. To do so, I trace W. E. B. Du Bois’s turn-of-the-century encounter with antebellum plantation ruin as an instance of historic and still ongoing Black resistance to monumental stylistics that have long dominated Western memory. Situating Du Bois’s encounter with ruin in this lineage illuminates how monumentality can undergird supremacist modes of inhabiting space and race and opens onto alternative, ecological styles of memorial dwelling enabled and called for by Black experiences of the ruinous wake of slavery.

Keywords:

• Black Memory
• Monumentality
• Racial Stylistics
• Ruin
• W. E. B. Du Bois

Acknowledgment

For their invaluable feedback on earlier versions of this essay, the author thanks Michael Bernard-Donals, Greg Dickinson, Pat Gehrke, Brian Ott, Kellie Sharp-Hoskins, Anthony Stagliano, and Nathan Stormer, as well as the attendees of the 2013 NCA Doctoral Honors Seminar in Rhetoric and Materiality and the 2013 RSA Institute workshop, “Rhetoric Memory Archive Museum.

Disclosure Statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Barnard (2018) reads a memorial tradition resistant to monumentality in African American thinkers from the nineteenth century on. Hartman, meanwhile, traces a countermemorial legacy in the subversive practices of enslaved peoples, and Sharpe attunes to one in contemporary Black expression.

2. Blight (2001) also analyzes Du Bois’s travels in the Black Belt in the context of ongoing Lost Cause memorializing, yet he does not examine monumentality per se.

3. For an analysis of the white supremacy inherent in overall assumptions that geography is fixed and neutral, see McKittrick.

4. In this, I affirm a shift in focus from Pierre Nora’s influential lieux de mémoire to milieux of memory. Nora understood milieux as realms of “real,” lived memory connected with “so-called primitive or archaic societies” (1989: p. 8). Following modernity’s homogenization and forgetfulness, he argued, lieux de mémoire—such as monuments—increasingly presented as symbolic agents of official “histories” that displaced milieux. In my view, monumental stylistics seek to ground memory in lieux de mémoire much in the sense that Nora indicated. In affirming resistance to this habit of memorial grounding, however, I depart from Nora’s historical (and developmental) understanding of milieux—instead conceiving stylistic milieux ontologically, as the realms where lieux de memoire continually come into (unstable) being.

5. For more on Du Bois’s positioning as a listener and learner in his Dougherty County trips, see (Wells, 2019: pp. 356–7).

6. For a considerable exception, see (Dunn, 2016). See also (Blair, Jeppeson, & Pucci, 1991; Vivian, 2008).

7. For rhetorical studies of Black memorial traditions, see the work of Patricia Davis. See also, e.g. (Browne, 1999; de Velasco, 2019; Eves, 2005; Phillips & Thomas, 2010; VanderHaagen, 2012).

8. Not only does classical monumentality not require the monument, but the monument by no means imposes classical monumentality. On the contrary, the form of the monument has regularly proven an ideal site to deconstruct classical monumentality, as apparent in the examples at this essay’s close. See also (Blair et al., 1991; Foss, 1986; Sanchez & Moore, 2015).

9. To attribute certain rhetorical tendencies to classical monumentality is not to suggest that it can’t become something else—as it has, indeed, in queer and postmodern uptakes (Blair et al., 1991; Dunn, 2016). But it is to underline that uptakes of monumentality inevitably connect with a racist aesthetic history, whether or not they seek to resist that history.

10. See, e.g. (Dunn, 2016). In contrast to Dunn, I don’t see these histories as moments that gave monumentality a bad reputation, but that further developed a supremacist potential in monumental tendencies to preservation and celebration active at least since the eighteenth century.

11. See, e.g., https://rollingout.com/2010/01/18/stop-the-santa-claus-ification-of-martin-luther-king-pleads-dr-cornel-west/. For many, King’s “Santa Clausification” is evident in the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial in Washington DC (Bruyneel, 2014).

12. Also see Hartman’s Scenes.

13. For further explicit critiques of classical monumentality, see also (Blair et al., 1991; Vivian, 2008). Several case studies of monuments and memorials have also critiqued specific features in (potential) association with classical monumentality (e.g., Balthrop, Blair, & Michel, 2010; Browne, 1999; Marback, 2009; McPhail, 2010; Phillips, 2010; Sanchez & Moore, 2015; VanderHaagen, 2012). See also Maxson, who theorizes “residual memory” as “the felt presence of monumental absence” (2020: p. 51).

14. Wiley’s remarks at the unveiling of his statue, “Rumors of War,” at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, on December 10, 2019. See Capps (2019); https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4k8Bzgu7_E

15. In contemporary debates, Lost Cause rhetoric continues to advance tropes of white victimage (see, e.g., Maxson, 2020).

16. Much white material property was eventually returned, despite the countervailing property claims of former slaves who had been instrumental in its accumulation (see Kelley, p. 110–34).

17. The monument being unveiled here has in recent years been subject of vocal criticism in Augusta, not least in reference to its inscription reading “No Nation Rose So White and Fair; None Fell So Pure of Crime.”

18. See Savage (2018), Chapter 6.

19. The UDC’s catechistic pedagogies, for example, are rhetorically analyzed by Heyse (2008). See also Cox (2003). For a related discussion of how Lost Cause and religious devotion were entwined, see Wilson (1989).

20. This count was established by the Southern Poverty Law Center as of September 15, 2020. It reflects the removal or relocation of 123 monuments since the 2015 massacre of nine Black worshippers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. 70 such monuments were removed or relocated after George Floyd’s murder in May of 2020.

21. Here I necessarily treat Lost Cause memory practices schematically. For detailed histories from which I derive this account, see (Blight, 2001; Cox, 2003; Foster, 1987; Nelson, 2013; Osterweis, 1973; Savage, 2018; Towns, 1998; Wilson, 1989).

22. Quote derived from Walker’s (2014) lecture to the Radcliffe Institute, “Sweet Talk,” discussing her installation, “A Subtlety.” https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/file/kara-walker-sweet-talk-radcliffe-institute

23. See Cooppan (2005) for an analysis of the resonances between Benjamin’s notion of allegory and Du Bois’s treatment of ruin and double consciousness.

24. Unless otherwise noted, all references in this section refer to The Souls of Black Folk.

25. Analyses and developments of double consciousness are too numerous to survey here, but for a treatment that influences the current essay, see Cooppan (2005). McKitttrick likewise notes geographic manifestations of double consciousness (see p. 22–3).

26. For elaborations of Du Bois’s doubled, allegorical approaches, see Cooppan (2005: p. 312).

27. See, e.g. (Trafton, 2005; Cooppan, 2005, p. 310–311).

28. Du Bois was in close company with many Black writers who have made complex connections between Blackness and Egypt (Trafton, 2005).

29. Also see Cooppan (2005: p. 311) on the figure of the Egyptian sphinx as operating allegorically.

30. Claims to property rights and reparations have been almost wholly denied to freed Black people and their descendants from the close of the Civil War to the present. See Kelley for an overview (p. 110–34).

31. On the complex figure of Egypt in Du Bois’s writings, see, e.g., Cooppan (2005); Hartnell.

32. In such a category, I include Hartman, Sharpe, and the memorialists they study, as well as Walker and Wiley.

33. Consider Weheliye’s discussion of Souls’ “injunction to imagine blackness sonically” (2005: p. 320).

34. See also Hartman on “critical fabulation” (2008).

35. For an analysis of Du Bois’s break with preservationist race rhetorics, see Wells (2019).

36. See also Sharpe, who speaks of a past that inhabits Black individuals (2016: p. 20).

37. For examples of stylistic experiments in redressing the past and reflections on the limits and failures of such redress, see (Sharpe, 2016, p. 113–34; Hartman, 2008).

38. Kehinde Wiley’s “Rumors of War.”

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Justine Wells

Justine Wells (PhD, University of South Carolina) is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric at New Mexico State University. Her research interests include histories of rhetoric; rhetorics of race, memory and environment; and sensory rhetorics.