Lexington Books
Pages: 244
•
Trim: 6½ x 9½
978-1-4985-6323-9 • Hardback • September 2018 • $117.00 • (£90.00)
978-1-4985-6324-6 • eBook • September 2018 • $111.00 • (£85.00)
Roger C. Aden is professor in the School of Communication Studies at Ohio University.
Acknowledgments
I. Introduction
Chapter 1. Haunting, Public Memories, and the National Mall
Roger C. Aden
II. Affective Presences of Ephemeral Memories
Chapter 2. Invoking the Spirits: A Rhetorical Séance
Aaron Hess, A. Cheree Carlson, and Carlos Flores
Chapter 3. Before the National Mall: Coxey’s Army and the Precedent for Public Protest
Sean Luechtefeld
Chapter 4. The Bonus Army March of 1932: Uneasy Legacies of Protest, Dissent, and Violence in American Memory
Roger C. Aden and Kenneth E. Foote
Chapter 5. The “Unmarked and Unremarked” Memories of the National Mall: Resurrection City and the Unreconciled History of the Civil Rights Movement as Radical Place-Making
Ethan Bottone, Derek H. Alderman, and Joshua Inwood
III. Faint Traces of Deflected Memories
Chapter 6. Haunting Dreams: Time and Affect in the Neoliberal Commemoration of “I Have a Dream”
Michael P. Vicaro
Chapter 7. The Haunting of “Forgotten” Places: Nineteenth Century Slave-Pens on the National Mall
Elizabethada A. Wright
Chapter 8. The Portrait Monument’s Emblematic and Tortured History
Teresa Bergman
Chapter 9. Which Souls Shall Haunt Us? Competing Genocidal Memoryscapes and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Selective Colonial Memorializations
Marouf Hasian Jr. and Stephanie Marek Muller
Chapter 10. Oft’ Remembered, Oft’ Forgotten: Remembering James Garfield
Theodore F. Sheckels
Chapter 11. The National Gallery of Art: Remembering the Haunting Voices of the Ghosts
Carl T. Hyden
IV. Conclusion
Chapter 12. Confronting the Ghosts in the National Attic
Roger C. Aden
Index
About the Editor
About the Contributors
We are, as Roger C. Aden suggests in the introduction to Rhetorics Haunting the National Mall, forever haunted by the past. We cannot escape the past, even when parts of it are dispersed, displaced, and downplayed. There may be no more compelling example of this truth than the commemorative landscape of the National Mall, which is the apogee of official appeals to national memory. For even as its monuments of marble and stone aggressively tell one story of our nation, other stories can be heard in the spaces betwixt and between these national landmarks. In a truly innovative collection of essays, Rhetorics Haunting the National Mall thoughtfully explores these alternative stories, illuminating the complex and contested nature of public memory in the process. A truly fascinating and unexpected examination of the most famous landscape of memory in the US.— Brian L. Ott, Texas Tech University
The authors in this provocative volume work to disrupt the memorial space of the National Mall by invoking the various voices who have used this space as a site of dissent and contestation and by attending to the memorial spaces often downplayed for bypassed. In so doing, these authors remind us that invoking the past is never simple and that understanding the power of public memory requires careful attention to its rhetoric.
— Kendall R. Phillips, Syracuse University
The impressive monuments in the heart of Washington, DC are familiar to most Americans. Rhetorics Haunting the National Mall is a highly original collection that actually reveals many events connected to this notable place that were displaced from public view. As such it reveals fractures in our national memory not apparent in the overall grandeur of the site.
— John Bodnar, Indiana University