Guest Editors' Introduction

Long before it described the advocacy of far-reaching political or social change, the word "radical" simply meant roots. This connotation of origins was never lost on radicals themselves. Fusing both etymologies in 1843, Karl Marx observed that to be "radical" was to "grasp things by the root," and a few years later in Syracuse, New York, the Radical Political Abolitionists described their radicalism as a "recovery" of the nation's roots—the "original powers" of liberty and equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

From the radical abolitionists to the Black Panthers and beyond, activists have repeatedly attempted to "root" their radicalism in fertile memories of the past. By recalling historic injustices, they have summoned a protest past—remembering not only chattel slavery, economic oppression, gender inequality, and racial violence, but also abolitionism, labor activism, early feminism, and antilynching campaigns. They have salvaged fragments of earlier radical movements and offered protest memory as both memory of protest and memory used to protest. They have rejected any notion of activist discontinuity and instead opened access to a past that—in the words of the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass—might be made "useful to the present and to the future."

Only recently, however, have scholars begun to fully identify the chosen and reshaped ancestry of protest movements and texts. This new scholarship on radical memory includes James Green's Taking History to Heart (2000), Jacquelyn Dowd Hall's "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past" (2005), John Lowney's History, Memory, and the Literary Left (2006), and Manning Marable's Living Black History (2006), among others. Marable explains that historical amnesia "blocks the construction of potentially successful social movements." Echoing Douglass, he adds that "the act of reconstructing history is inextricably linked to the political practices . . . of transforming the present and future." In his 2004 book Passages to Freedom, David W. Blight offers a unifying theory for this wave of new scholarship, explaining the vital difference between feel-good memories that serve the ends of social stability, nostalgia, and politically engaged memories that function as innovative, liberating counter-myths, radical memory.

The five articles in our special issue of JSR continue to trace the origins, evolution, and aesthetics of this radical memory. In addition to crystallizing further the difference between nostalgia and memory, they debunk the long-standing assumption that only conservatives have a hold on tradition, and that radical movements and their protest literature have rejected historical memory. Each article offers a history of memory and explores its use as a political weapon. In doing so, these five scholars also examine radicalism and memory in the context of race—whether black protest, Mexican American protest, interracialism, or the intersection of race and gender. Together they form a rich interdisciplinary interrogation of the politics and possibilities of radical historical memory.

In the spirit of radical activists and writers who looked back in order to push their societies forward, we have arranged the articles to move backward chronologically. Dan Berger opens the issue with a theorization of contemporary collective memory. He examines the twenty-first-century prosecutions of white racists and black militants for crimes committed during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, arguing that these trials involved the state representing the past to fulfill its contemporary political agenda. Berger shows how re-imagining Black Power as a series of bygone excesses allows the state to use the historical memory of radicalism against radicals themselves.

Voichita Nachescu also explores the usable past of Black Power, but for a very different end. Deconstructing the sex/race analogy that appeared within first- and second-wave feminist movements, she shows that borrowing from Black Power—as well as early women's rights discourses—helped white radical feminists of the 1970s to focus on male power even as they alienated black feminists. Ashley Lucas connects the 1970s to the 1940s, arguing that Luis Valdez's play Zoot Suit (1978) reshaped the performances of terror in Mexican American communities that took place during and after the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots. By tackling the...