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Rhetorics Haunting the National Mall: Displaced and Ephemeral Public Memories

2022; Michigan State University; Volume: 25; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.14321/rhetpublaffa.25.1.0133

1534-5238

Daniel M. Chick,

Rhetoric and Communication Studies

In 2013, a fellow classmate, my professor, and I visited the National Mall. Taking a brief respite from the National Communication Association's annual conference, we traveled extensively through its miles of sidewalks and paths to enjoy the sights and learn more about national history. We walked up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and gazed at the Washington Monument at the other side of the Reflecting Pool. We noticed the grandeur of the World War II Memorial and, in contrast, the obligatory somberness of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The National Mall's narrative compels its visitors, like us, to privilege these particular commemorations over others. However, as is usually the case, the most popular, aggrandized, or extravagant snippets of memory found in these locations did not tell us the whole story.Most narratives conjured by the National Mall and its sites of memory conform to a unitary retelling of the nation's storied past. As Roger C. Aden explains in Rhetorics Haunting the National Mall, despite its relatively young age—having “only taken shape in the last 100 years or so”—the Mall's “classical architecture and historical subject matter” insinuates “a timeless landscape” with a stable central narrative about who, and what, the nation is (3–4). Monuments, like those on the Mall, highlight core national values by memorializing the revolutionary legacies of presidents championing liberal democracy, egalitarianism, and valor, as well as the sacrifice of untold numbers of servicemembers who fought to uphold those ideals. As Aden also notes, through its focus on the enum (the “stories of a collective people” that are brought together “to unify a nation”), the National Mall is designed to be read in a particular way (7). The Mall's importance as a seemingly immutable repository of national memory cannot be understated: its commemorative beauty attracts millions of visitors each year.Nevertheless, there exist other, ephemeral narratives haunting the National Mall not noticeable in the course of a casual walk. This text's important contribution comes from uncovering hidden memories present in the National Mall to explain how they reshape a reading of its narrative. Aden describes these pervasive, hidden memories that function within the Mall as “individual experiences of those affected” by events within or around the Mall (or “the pluribus”). Individual memories, Aden continues, “work to make tangible that which is seemingly absent yet still present” (7). When considering when and how individuals create memory, the Mall loses some of its narrative stability; it becomes less a site of unification and more one of “protestation and consternation” (35). Aden uncovers those hidden, ephemeral memories that produce discontinuous, disorderly, or disconcerting stories about the nation's past in order to explain how they reshape a reading of the National Mall's narrative. Thus, Aden's edited volume focuses on memories that “haunt” the National Mall (7).The book is divided into four sections. The first section, by Aden, sets the stage for investigating the various “hauntings” present on the National Mall. The second describes an “affective” and persistent memory inhabiting “in individuals, discourses, or movements” (8). Containing chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5, this section explores the Mall's use as a site of countering dominant commemorations. In chapter 2, Aaron Hess, Carlos Flores, and A. Charee Carlson undertake a “rhetorical séance, a gathering of memories present as they call upon memories past” (17). In so doing, they examine their corresponding experiences with the Mall during three important movements: the AIDS Quilt in 1996, the Rally to Restore Sanity in 2010, and the Women's March in 2017. Chapter 3, by Sean Luechtefeld, investigates the Mall as a site of remonstration in 1894 and argues that memories associated with protest were not merely forgotten but “obliterate[d]” (36). Kenneth Foote and Aden then enlighten the reader about the Bonus Expeditionary Force's use of the Mall in 1932 as a site for protest in chapter 4. However, visitors will find “no evidence of these sites of violence and tragedy” because they too have been “largely obliterated” from the Mall's commemorative topography (54). In chapter 5, Ethan Bottone, Derek Alderman, and Joshua Inwood observe how another group, Resurrection City, used the Mall as a protest encampment. They argue that Resurrection City became “a site of radical place-making,” which demonstrates how “memory politics” privilege certain narratives over others (72).The third section considers displacement, or how the “ghosts of memory haunt us through faint traces of their presence deflected away from the prominent places of public memory installed throughout the Mall” (8). Containing chapters 6–11, this section explains how memories that do not fit within the central narrative of the Mall still affect any reading of it. In chapter 6, Michael Vicaro explains how placement can (de)emphasize aspects of memory using a plaque on the Lincoln Memorial commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Elizabethada Wright, in chapter 7, describes how “slave-pens’ histories were framed to be forgotten” while also illustrating the inadequacy of these frames to actually accomplish this task. The slave-pens still “haunted the other memorial rhetorical places of the Mall and continue to do so despite recent efforts at remembering” (116). Chapter 8, by Teresa Bergman, considers how the Portrait Monument provoked a logic of dissensus “within the women's movement and within the Congress” (136). Marouf Hasian, Jr. and Stephanie Marek Muller show, in chapter 9, how the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum uses “master-narratives” to include some voices while precluding others (157). In chapter 10, Theodore Sheckels examines the numerous sites commemorating James Garfield to uncover narratives of “communal shame and guilt” that explain his peculiar popularity in the nation's capital (176). Carl T. Hyden, in chapter 11, argues that the National Gallery of Art “‘contains’ histories and ideas as well as collections of art” that show discontinuous narratives about the nation and its “less-than-ideal practices” (194). In chapter 12, as part of the final section, Aden succinctly provides a number of important implications for uncovering these discontinuous narratives.Overall, this edited volume makes a welcome and robust addition to memory studies literature. Much in the same way as Kirk Savage's Monument Wars and Dell Upton's What Can and Cannot be Said, the studies in this text richly describe the commemorative landscape created through monuments. In so doing, this text highlights histories that may be hidden to control the narrative of who or what the nation may be. Furthermore, when read in tandem with Aden's other edited volume, U.S. Public Memory, Rhetoric, and the National Mall, the reader will enjoy a comprehensive retelling of national memories from mainstream and moral to ephemeral and forgotten (or “obliterated”) perspectives. Due to its substantial contributions to the literature, I welcome this text.