Reflecting on “Recollections,” a workshop about memorials and memorial museums

Pushing the Limits of Memorial Museums

Our first panel was moderated by Robin Kirk, Duke professor and faculty co-chair for the Duke Human Rights Center. Kirk asked the panelists to respond to the multivalent idea of working through the memorial museum. Angela M. Mason, Executive Director at the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice, spoke about her time as Director of the North Carolina African American Heritage Commission, where she worked to help “everyday grassroots people explore creative ways to honor and preserve and amplify everyday African American stories.” Mason described how her work with African American public heritage and history sites over the last decade has shifted her focus to new questions, primarily, “How do we call up this history? How do we honor this history? How do we commemorate this history outside of the container of a museum?”

In my own work on World War II sites, I have often grappled with this idea of the museum as more than just a container. Memorial museums do not just hold objects; they actively create stories using particular and powerful strategies of articulation, which I refer to in my own research as the “grammar of the museum.” This unique grammar helps us hold memorial museums apart from other commemorative forms, but it also draws them into a directly comparative discourse with other kinds of memory.

I know that if something happened to me, I would want someone to uphold my memory.

As award-winning poet and educator Crystal Simone Smith reminded us, the museum is necessarily static in its place, and, in the cases of sites that commemorate dark histories of violence against marginalized people, “the people who need to go there don’t often go.”

 

Smith spoke about her writing process, which engages with texts and archival material as inspiration for found poetry and haiku, as a way of grappling with grief and bringing forward the voices of those who have been “silenced to death” to a wider audience. Smith acknowledged the intensity of this important but difficult work and insisted, “I know that if something happened to me, I would want someone to uphold my memory.”

 

It struck me that this idea, so elegantly articulated by Smith, is the impetus behind many memory projects. There is a great desire to restore life and liveliness, to tell the stories of the dead and lost and left behind. Amy Sodaro, professor of Sociology at BMCC CUNY and author of the book Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence, described it as “a way of both restoring the humanity of individuals who were dehumanized through various programs of mass atrocity but also connecting to visitors through individual stories.”

Take that word museum and make it flexible.

Torren Gatson, who joined us from the Department of History at UNC-Greensboro, suggested that we should “take that word museum and make it flexible.” As an example of this, Sodaro recounted the way that, in the pursuit of more meaningful engagement with audiences, memorial museums are shifting from object-focused exhibits to narrative-focused ones that make use of new digital media, like the Legacy Museum in Montgomery or Greenwood Rising in Tulsa. We might say that memorial museums are becoming even more hybridized than their name already implies. Yet Sodaro acknowledged that these changes alone might not be enough to overcome other obstacles and move us toward what Mason described as “using history as a tool to help people understand the power of possibility … to help people envision the possibility of building new worlds and new futures.”

Our panelists were honest about the difficulty of bringing marginalized histories to the fore in this particular moment. Many sites benefited from great investment in 2020 and 2021 following the Black Lives Matter protests, but that investment is now drying up. Coupled with a rise in heated rhetoric at the local, state, and federal level, these sites find their programs increasingly under pressure.

We might think that memorialization through poetry, such as in Smith’s Dark Testament collection, would be an antidote to the anxieties felt at memorial museum sites, subject as they are to politics, shifting donor priorities, and the complex needs of maintaining physical infrastructure. However, the publishing industry is subject to many of those same pressures, and Smith ran into difficulties seeing her book to publication.

Though there is an acute feeling of crisis right now across these modes of memory, the panel insisted that this work has never been without pushback. “There’s always been certain inflection points,” Gatson allowed. “For the future, it’s going to take more cooperative and collaborative public work.”

Mason described how education programming and training at the Pauli Murray Center has been forced to shift as new laws put “great and grave restriction on what can be taught in the classroom as it relates to history, social justice, equity, sexuality, gender identity.” The Center's new work is supporting educators as they navigate the policies that restrict them and giving the community space to “to think beyond that and build a generative future.”

Gatson expounded upon the importance of truth-telling in these moments, describing the power contained in “the more than common reality of an unhappy ending.” The work is made all the more difficult when the sociopolitical climate refuses to support memory work and memory workers. I was inspired by the panel’s frankness but also optimism as they all work to preserve space to hold past grief in an often-hostile present.

 

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Members of the second panel, "Cooperation and Coalition in Memory"

Finding the “Story-keepers”

Cooperation and collaboration were the topics of our second panel, moderated by Adam Rosenblatt, Duke professor of International Comparative Studies and Cultural Anthropology. The panel began with Rosenblatt inviting everyone to speak a little bit about the way they think about audience in their work.

Daniel Jones identified the challenge of maintaining an existing audience while cultivating a new one, and asked how a site can expand its programming to invite “those who don’t even know what audience they’re a part of yet” into a space in which they have never been included before. Jones is the cultural curator at the Cameron Art Museum (CAM) in Wilmington, North Carolina, and he works on interpretation and preservation of a Civil War historic site where United States Colored Troops fought and are now memorialized.

Though our first panel drew attention to the ways that museums, memorials, and monuments can sometimes feel all too static and contained, Jones described going out into the community to locate those stories and bring them into the site, meeting both the stories and the people where they are. In particular, he identified faith communities in Wilmington as “story-keepers” and noted that CAM hoped its memory site could guide new programming within the art museum and even become a “gathering place of fellowship”.

Nan Kim, professor of History and Co-Director of Public History at UW Milwaukee, discussed her work with public memory both in South Korea and in Milwaukee as part of her path as an “accidental public historian,” a sentiment that many of our panelists shared. Kim recognized that, though she has worked on memory and commemoration her entire career, she has learned much from the memory community in Milwaukee, and in Milwaukee’s Bronzeville neighborhood in particular, since stepping into her role as director of the public history program. The revitalization of cultural space in this area has created multivalent sites of artwork, memory, and history that cultivate community dialogue and connect commemoration of Milwaukee’s African American history with the communities working on similar projects across the U.S., including here in Durham.

The sites are meant to travel with us, and in turn foment new projects beyond the scope of the museum.

Khadija McNair, former assistant manager at Stagville State Historic Site and current site manager at the North Carolina Freedom Park, remembered seeing how memory work at one site often leads to other memory work, including a project to commission public art in Durham dedicated to the memory of those enslaved at Stagville; “There’s so many stories I could tell of folks coming in… hearing the stories, really connecting with the site and then going out and building upon that.”

McNair has been instrumental in revitalizing Stagville’s content and tour experience to focus on the multifaceted lives of the people who were enslaved there. Her care and cultivation have enabled new ways of remembering that reach new audiences and remind us that the very best memory sites can aspire to is having an impact that continues after visitors leave. The sites are meant to travel with us, and in turn foment new projects beyond the scope of the museum.

We asked our panelists to speak about the differences between sites that commemorate an event or a history where it happened, what Rosenblatt referred to as a kind of intimacy with history, and sites built in a strategic location.

McNair spoke directly to this difference between the two sites she has recently worked at but recognized that even a site like the Freedom Park embodies the place in which it stands. Though her interpretive goals at a site like the Freedom Park are narratively different from those when interpreting for descendants of enslaved people at Stagville, there is still a history of enslavement where the Freedom Park now stands. McNair wants to bring those histories into the space alongside the more famous voices that the park commemorates and make room for both possibilities of claiming public space and raising unknown stories.

Duke professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist studies Anna Storti explained that her lack of attachment to a particular discipline or method has allowed her to take an expansive view on the question of where memory is housed. “I’m not someone who really works in museums,” Storti admitted. “I think memory through the site of the body.” Her words reminded me of Mason’s earlier comments about the museum as more than just a container; indeed, how can the museum hold space to be marked and changed by the bodies that move through and around it, even and especially those bodies that it has historically excluded? And if these sites are moving away from objects behind glass and more toward embodied narrative experience, what do these bodies carry away from it?

Some ghosts are ones you want to make your kin and others not so much.

The idea of haunting kept appearing at the margins of our discussion, and towards the end of the panel, Storti and Jones both discussed ghostliness in these spaces directly. Though the panelists expressed their reservations about engaging too much in the occult, anyone who works with or has visited enough memory sites has viscerally felt these echoes of the past.

Jones suggested that one of a memory practitioner’s roles was a kind of curation of ghosts, or a negotiation not just between a site and its community but between those who are here and those who are not anymore. Storti added that we need to be thinking about “right relationships with the dead not just the living” and agreed that “when you go into a space and know that there are ghosts here, some ghosts are ones you want to make your kin and others not so much.”

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Building Community in Memory-Work

At the end of our long but productive day together, we gathered for one last conversation reflecting on what we wanted to carry forward. To start, I invited everyone to share a memory site they had encountered as a visitor that was particularly meaningful to them. Almost everyone spoke to the powerful embodiedness that such sites have the potential to evoke, and I was reminded that all of us interact with these sites as subjects of memory as much as we are part of its excavation and curation.

Much like the prior conversations, we kept returning to the idea of community, but we took a moment to address our community that participates in what Mason described earlier as “memory-making work, memory-keeping work, and memory-holding work.”

As our conversations showed, there are very real stakes in bringing contentious histories forth. Practitioners and public historians are on the frontlines of memory, and though that means they get to see memory sites change people’s relationships with their past firsthand, they are also subject to threats and risks because of that very same work. As such, the reminder that none of us are in this work alone was not taken lightly.

Across the many insights of the day, the sentiment that we all kept coming back to was simply how nice it was to be in a room full of people who were grappling with the same questions as each other, and now grappling with them together.

As Gatson reminded us, there were still so many more scholars, practitioners, artists, and activists who were not in the room with us. This workshop could not be an end but a start to a more sustained effort to create these spaces. As this group of people who think so deeply about how to engage and create community through these sites discussed their victories and struggles, it was not lost on me that this kind of community-making is no less important to the success and sustainment of our projects.

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