Communication
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Item CONSTRUCTING A LEGACY: THE ROLE OF ANNIVERSARY COMMEMORATIONS IN REMEMBERING BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION(2019) Bruner, Jaclyn Leigh; Pfister, Damien S.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Brown v. Board of Education (1954) was the landmark Supreme Court decision that outlawed legal segregation in the United States. This project engages with three commemorative events that mark the anniversary of the decision--the 25th, 50th, and 64th anniversaries--to investigate how public memory of Brown v. Board of Education is constructed and how the legacy of the decision is remembered. Anniversaries, as moments where kairotic and chronotic conceptions of time come together, offer an opportunity to (re)define the past through the work of public memory. Although Brown’s memory at the “monumental” 25th anniversary featured coordinated regional commemorations, Brown’s legacy of race and memory is nationalized and largely sanitized by the 50th anniversary. In contrast to these momentous anniversaries, the non-monumental 64th anniversary articulated a counter-regional identity for Topeka, Kansas. By tracing the public memory of Brown across a 60-year period, this dissertation extends James Boyd White’s theory of justice-as-translation, asserting that the critical, rhetorical attention to the public memory of the Brown decision enacts a form of narrative justice and, consequently, advances a new way of conceptualizing persistent, de facto segregation and racial injustice in our contemporary world.Item COMMEMORATIVE ACTIVISM: TRACING BLACK NATIONALISM THROUGH CONTEMPORARY CAMPAIGNS TO MEMORIALIZE U.S. SLAVERY, 1991-2017(2018) Fitzmaurice, Megan Irene; Parry-Giles, Shawn J; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)While much of current public discourse focuses on the ways that black activists are working to desecrate or destroy racist memorials, there has been less discussion about the ways that lobbying to produce antiracist memorials can also serve as a form of protest. This study engages three case studies wherein black activist groups fought for the construction of slavery memorials in New York City, Philadelphia, and Richmond. These instances of commemorative activism are the focus of this study, wherein activists challenge existing commemorative culture by engaging alternative memorial practices. The underlying premise of this study is that these slavery memorials and the activists’ rhetoric resisted absent and/or distorted memories of slavery in their communities. This study analyzes the debates surrounding these memorials to demonstrate ways that the activists recirculated historical ideologies of black nationalism in their protest rhetoric. Specifically, the activists engaged themes of self-determination, black liberation, black power, and Pan-Africanism as they sought to challenge a commemorative culture rooted in white supremacy. This study accordingly situates commemorative activism as a contemporary strategy of resistance in the ongoing black freedom struggle. The black activists in this study fought to determine the commemorative landscape, liberate their ancestors’ memories from post-slavery containment, recover memories of black resistance from selective amnesia, and advance global solidarity surrounding memories of the slave trade and ongoing anti-black racism. This study also examines ways that the subsequent commemorations represent enduring repositories of black nationalist ideologies, challenging racist cultural attitudes embedded in the memorials’ environment. Through their form and function, these commemorations visualize the continued relevance of self-determination, black liberation, black power, and Pan-Africanism within post-slavery communities. These memorials ultimately reflect the beliefs of the activists who fought for their construction, revealing the radical potential of commemorative activism to challenge racist attitudes, structures, and landscapes.