Let the Light Shine: Reclaiming Public Space Through Digital Projection

Abstract

Amid the racial uprisings of 2017 and 2020, digital projections emerged as a mode of protest contributing to the calls for removal of Confederate monuments. These digital projections, I argue, created a dialogue between the contested Confederate monuments (the past) and their contemporary surroundings (the present). By examining the digital projections that were cast upon the Albert Pike Memorial in Washington, D.C. and the Robert E. Lee Monument in Richmond, Virginia, I demonstrate how they employed a palimpsest to facilitate discourse concerning public memorialization practices and to re-contextualize and reclaim contested sites into spaces for community engagement.

Keywords:

• Lost cause memorialization
• palimpsest
• public memory
• vernacular

Acknowledgements

The author would especially like to thank Jennifer Juszkiewicz, Andy Uhrich, Saul Kutnicki, Norma Musih, Robert Terrill, Odile Hobeika, and Rachel McCabe for their thoughtful feedback, helpful resources, and encouragement on this piece. Additionally, the author wants to thank the AARRG for reading this and helping to reframe it. Finally, the editor and reviewers of the “Amending Our Pasts and Futures” special issue are thanks for providing the perfect opportunity to share this work. Amid the racial uprisings of 2017 and 2020, digital projections emerged as a mode of protest contributing to the calls for removal of Confederate monuments. These digital projections, I argue, created a dialogue between the contested Confederate monuments (the past) and their contemporary surroundings (the present). By examining the digital projections that were cast upon the Albert Pike Memorial in Washington, D.C. and the Robert E. Lee Monument in Richmond, Virginia, I demonstrate how they employed a palimpsest to facilitate discourse concerning public memorialization practices and to re-contextualize and reclaim contested sites into spaces for community engagement.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Ono and Sloop (1995) explain, “vernacular discourse is speech that resonates within local communities… [and it] is unique to specific communities” (p. 20).

2 A similar conversation takes place in Blair, C., & Michel, N. (2000). Reproducing civil rights tactics: The rhetorical performances of the Civil Rights Memorial. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 30(2), 31–55.