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Commemorations
Memory is as central to modern politics as politics is central to modern memory. We are so accustomed to living in a forest of monuments, to having the past represented to us through museums, historic sites, and public sculpture, that we easily lose sight of the recent origins and diverse meanings of these uniquely modern phenomena. In this volume, leading historians, anthropologists, and ethnographers explore the relationship between collective memory and national identity in diverse cultures throughout history. Placing commemorations in their historical settings, the contributors disclose the contested nature of these monuments by showing how groups and individuals struggle to shape the pa...
Emancipation
"Emancipation critically interrogates the impact of sculpture in public life, centering around ideas of agency and emancipation in historical and contemporary expression. The fulcrum of the book will be the Amon Carter Museum of American Art's copy of John Quincy Adams Ward's bronze sculpture The Freedman (1863). Unlike conventional depictions of enslaved African Americans at this time, which showed them as powerless, this heroic figure has broken his chains. The catalogue begins with an introduction to Civil War-era works contextualizing The Freedman, then examines the work of six contemporary Black artists whose respective practices engage the mediums of sculpture and installation connected to themes of freedom or imprisonment, the long legacy of the Civil War in the United States, body, and personhood. Featuring the work of Sadie Barnette, Maya Freelon, Hugh Hayden, Letitia Huckaby, Jeffrey Meris, and Sable Elyse Smith, as well as a reprinted short story by N.K. Jemisin, Emancipation brings contemporary issues of racial inequities, the legacy of war and conflict, and issues of freedom-or lack thereof-for Black Americans to the fore"--
The Boston Cosmopolitans
This book traces the progression of cosmopolitanism from the private experience of a group of artists and intellectuals who lived and worked in Boston between 1865 and 1915 to finished works of monumental art that shaped public space.
US Public Memory, Rhetoric, and the National Mall
US Public Memory, Rhetoric, and the National Mall examines “the nation’s front yard,” understanding it as both a public face the United States presents to the world and a site where its less apparent moral story is told. This book provides a uniquely thorough, interdisciplinary, and integrated examination of how the National Mall shares a moral story of the United States and, in so doing, reveals the soul of the nation. The contributors explore 11 different memorials, monuments, and museums found across the Mall, considering how each rhetorically remembers a key element of the nation’s past, what the rhetorical memory tells us about the nation’s soul, and how each site must thus be understood in relation to the commemorative landscape of the Mall.
Monument Wars
Traces the history of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., discussing its plan and structures, and considering how the concept of memorials and memorial space has changed since the nineteenth century.
Memorials to Shattered Myths
Memorials to Shattered Myths: Vietnam to 9/11 traces the evolution and consequences of a new hybrid paradigm, which grants a heroic status to victims of national tragedies, and by extension to their families, thereby creating a class of privileged participants in the permanent memorial process. Harriet F. Senie suggests that instead the victims' families be able to determine the nature of an interim memorial, one that addresses their needs in the critical time between the murder of their loved ones and the completion of the permanent memorial. She also observes that the memorials discussed herein are inadvertently based on strategies of diversion and denial that direct our attention away from actual events, and reframe tragedy as secular or religious triumph. In doing so, they camouflage history, and seen as an aggregate, they define a nation of victims, exactly the concept they and their accompanying celebratory narratives were apparently created to obscure.
The Nineteenth-century Visual Culture Reader
This Reader brings together, for the first time, key writings about the nineteenth century, a key period in contemporary discussion of visual culture. Exploring such topics as photographs, exhibitions and advertising the editors suggest that 'modernity' rather than 'modernism' is a valuable way of understanding the changes particular to the visual culture of the time, and they investigate a variety of nineteenth-century images, technologies and visual experiences. With three specially-written essays about definitions of visual culture as an object of study, the book examines genealogies and introduces key writings about culture from writers living in the nineteenth century itself or from tho...
Presidential Temples
This book explores the visual and material cultures of presidential commemoration--memorials and monuments, libraries and archives--and the problematic ways in which presidents themselves have largely taken over their own commemoration. The author sees these various commemorative sites as playing a key role in the construction of our collective political and cultural self-images and as another sign of our preoccupation with celebrity culture. Ultimately, he contends, these presidential temples reflect not only our civil religion but also the extraordinary expansion of executive authority--and presidential self-commemoration--since FDR.
