In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials
  • G. Mitchell Reyes
Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials. Edited by Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian L. Ott . Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010; pp ix + 282. $52.00 cloth, $27.00 paper.

Public memory is now a well-established subfield within rhetorical studies. Countless essays ponder the socio-cultural force of remembrance, interrogate the play of domination and resistance in the agon of mnemonic practice, contemplate the dialectical relations between collective remembering and collective identity, and ponder the tensions between past and present—or more accurately, the tensions between historical fidelity to the past and contemporary political motives in the present—that can be teased out of memory's public significations. Yet for all the insight and acumen of these studies, it appears we have still scarcely scratched the surface. Such is my conclusion after reading Places of Public Memory, which makes a compelling argument that rhetorical scholarship on public memory has [End Page 594] yet to attend sufficiently to memory's material manifestations and the ways in which they shape affective experience.

Allow me to explain: although scholarship on the rhetoric of remembrance is varied and extensive, it tends toward the discursive. This is reasonable enough given our twentieth-century roots in the study of oratory, but one consequence is an overemphasis on the rhetorical nature of mnemonic discourse and an underemphasis on the rhetorical force of public memory's material presence: the way it structures space, ordering our experience of the "past." One of the more impressive elements of Places of Public Memory is the degree of care the editors take in laying out this argument in the introduction. There Dickinson, Blair, and Ott offer an exhaustive literature review—useful to anyone interested in the study of public memory—to show that attention to the materiality of remembrance and the ways such materiality structures affective experience will significantly expand our current understanding of the rhetoric of public memory.

Their differentiation between space and place is crucial, for in it we find a bridge between rhetoric and the memoryscapes that figure affective experience. Although not opposites, space and place have radically different characters: space is undifferentiated—unmarked—whereas demarcation and differentiation constitute place; space allows for open, unfettered movement whereas place enables pause, identification, and differentiation. Spaces are a-signifying whereas places exist only through signification. In the symbolic action of remembrance we transform spaces into places—memorials and monuments, whole malls of memory, where tourists come to bear witness to the past. Through a rhetorical effect we might call "emplacement," memoryscapes transform space into place, not merely to narrate the past but perhaps more importantly to imbue the mnemonic place with an ethos of historical authenticity. That ethos is what many experience as they traverse sites of memory.

Places of Public Memory calls us to attend carefully to the symbolic action of mnemonic emplacement that engenders emotional attachments to particular figurations of the past. If we are to understand the rhetoric of public memory in any thorough way, the book suggests, we must address sites of memory as the fulcrum between structured affective experience and the production of collective identities. This is an ambitious enterprise, to be sure, and so the editors offer a fairly simple structure to organize the volume: the first three essays emphasize rhetoric, the next two, memory, and the final three, place. [End Page 595]

The essays comprising the opening section offer several insights into the rhetorical character of American memory sites. Bryan Taylor's opening essay on American nuclear museums examines how these sites relegate the controversial nature of nuclear technology to the past, concealing how nuclear power compressed time and space in the twentieth century, fractured anything resembling a public sphere, and justified the emergence of a surveillance-based technocracy. Victoria Gallagher's and Margret LaWare's essay on the Monument to Joe Louis in Detroit uses a historical-rhetorical approach to illuminate the racial tensions inherent in the monument and the paradoxical way in which its obvious reference to racial inequality appears to forestall productive deliberation of contemporary racial issues. And Gregory Clarke...

pdf