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Access Type
WSU Access
Date of Award
January 2023
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Department
Communication
First Advisor
Kelly Young
Abstract
The rhetoric of lynching has been both omnipresent and absent in the memory of the American experience. Yet, when living in America, Black people have been faced with violent encounters that have happened constantly, and rationales for and against the violence have flooded public discourse. While some forms of lynching and white racial violence have been outlawed, new forms of anti-Black violence operate as "modern-day lynching" (Ore 7). This project investigates new commemorative spaces and artifacts (the Whitney plantation, the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and the 2019 documentary Always in Season). It examines how these artifacts operate as material rhetoric that forms identities and meaning, produces affect, mediates our understanding of reality, and analyzes how these new memory spaces and objects help us remember racial violence and the lessons they teach us about history. These artifacts are significate because they operate as counter-memories that challenge and resist the ideology of colorblindness that seeks to minimize the importance of the past's racist legacy on the problems of racial violence today.
Recommended Citation
Seay-Howard, Ariel Elizabeth, "Remembering A Violent Memory: A Material Critique" (2023). Wayne State University Dissertations. 3845.
https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations/3845