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

Reviewed by:
  • Public Memory, Race, and Ethnicity
  • Jennifer Heusel
Public Memory, Race, and Ethnicity. Edited by G. Mitchell Reyes. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010; pp. viii + 216. $59.99 cloth.

Motivated by conversations at a 2007 international and interdisciplinary conference at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, the book Public Memory, Race, and Ethnicity “seeks to promote increased understanding of the relationship between practices of remembrance and perceptions of race and ethnicity” (2). This collection of essays, edited by G. Mitchell Reyes, positions race and ethnicity at the center of public memory “to illuminate the taken-for-granted, normative force of whiteness in conventional public memories and to challenge the official record with counter-memories” (2). Divided into three parts, the book comprises nine essays in which authors explore a variety of case studies in the United States since the Civil War. Organized chronologically, each essay examines a different object of study, which includes sculptural memorials, collegiate rituals, novels, local and personal histories, and photographs. Shared among contributors is a rhetorical sensibility that “[p]ublic memory is not an object, it is a practice; expression is its lifeblood” (4). Rhetoric, as these essays confirm, provides useful hermeneutics for arranging the dynamic tesserae of memory and identity experiences. [End Page 740]

Although rhetoric is proven useful, several essays also warn against romanticizing its critical potential in facilitating racial reconciliation (107). Such reconciliation necessarily involves attending to tragedies of the past, which too often are erased from public memory narratives because they are painful (24, 46, 152, 180). The urge to erase, silence, forget, and transcend racial tragedy is both psychologic and sensual. Many of the authors recognize these motivations as informing racial and ethnic memories and attend to them in various ways (28, 65, 80, 108). Such recognition is the most valuable contribution of this collection to a rhetorical study of race and racism.

The first section begins with three essays about the “borders of public memory, race, and ethnicity,” which is also the title of the section. Although organized chronologically, the essays share a thematic trope of assimilation. Specifically, these authors attend to the emotional and psychologic experiences of integrating into a different culture. These experiences can reveal the power dynamics behind memory production, which include supporting ideal narratives about the nation and rejecting tragic or inconvenient stories about one’s past. Stephen Browne opens this section with an essay that demonstrates how assimilation functions differently for different lived experiences in the United States: Chinese sojourners in California, Norwegian newcomers in the Midwest, and African Americans in slavery. Whereas Browne examines the mnemonic practices in memory texts, Maureen Reed argues that public statues of Sacagawea provide exemplars of one’s “willingness to assimilate” with mainstream American hierarchies about race, ethnicity, and gender (36). The final essay in this section, by Thomas Sabatini, demonstrates how public assimilation narratives about European immigrants maintain the politics of white privilege and deflect responsibility for persistent oppression of nonwhites (52). This section illuminates how narratives of assimilation naturalize certain social benefits of white privilege.

The trope of assimilation continues as a thematic in the essays in the second section entitled “The Contestation of Memory, Race, and Ethnicity.” Janis Edwards’s essay continues to ponder the psychologic and emotional motivations of assimilation. She argues that Japanese American internment memorials “are suggestive of the remaining contradictions of rejection and assimilation that continue to affect American identity and ethnic subjectivity” (74). Assimilation here is clearly a status of American citizenship expressed through dress and other daily habits. In the third essay in this section, Amy Heuman and Catherine Langford agree. They examine the [End Page 741] traditions and institutional rituals at Texas A&M University as codifying citizenship habits as white, southern, and male. Students who assimilate into these rituals are rewarded with full institutional citizenship. The second essay in this section by Mark Lawrence McPhail breaks the thematic uniformity of the others by not addressing the trope of assimilation directly. He nonetheless provides a significant reminder for rhetorical critics of race: the logics of remembering and forgetting are often determined by skin color (102), and the memorials for racial reconciliation themselves may elicit...

pdf