Ersatz America: Hidden Traces, Graphic Texts, and the Mending of Democracy by Rebecca Mark (review)

There are stories we agree to tell, and there are stories we agree to forget, narratives effaced under a palimpsest of fantasy or willed amnesia. Rebecca Mark confronts the legacies of these latter narratives in Ersatz America, a project concerned with the slippages between overdetermined hallucinations and ersatz monuments of democracy and the “visceral graphism” (Mark’s term) depicting what it looks like to have democracy withheld (3). These hieroglyphics, “those significant cultural marks that citizens leave as they connect to human desires and passions at unspeakable moments in American history,” emerge at the juncture between public history and private experience (3). In articulating what national discourses cannot, these manifold eruptions rewrite the abstractions and mythologies of American history we reiterate so compulsively. Mark’s project testifies to the plasticity of both narratives (ersatz as well as revisionist), situating them throughout the book as some kind of perverse call and response, a dialogue about the ongoing, unfulfilled work of actualizing what it means to carry out the ideals and ideologies of democracy.

Because this is a book “about learning to decipher and value the delicate, non-alphabetic graphic record carved into American memory,” part of its strength lies in its encompassing vision, one that moves across four hundred years of what William James deems the “crannies” of historical narrative: quadrant marks of post-Katrina New Orleans delineating the living from the dead, widening gaps between the cracked ice Eliza must leap across in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the surprising resiliency of George Washington’s head, or the opaque, biomorphic Bakongo cosmograms drilled into southern church floors (Mark 24; James qtd. in Mark 1). What could have easily become a laundry list of cultural obsessions instead coalesces into a cogent counternarrative offering an alternative to a national penchant for monumentalism.

Each of the five chapters emanates beyond the geographic, chronological, or community confines of specific case studies. Thus, we move in chapter 1 from friezes in the Capitol Rotunda depicting the seminal moments of American mythology (the arrival of Columbus, the slaughter of indigenous populations, the fraternal embrace of soldiers allegorizing reconciliation after the bloodshed of the Civil War) to their contrapuntal resonances (Kerry James Marshall’s murals of bobble-head Jeffersons and Washingtons, Clyde Connell’s “Swamp Songs,” and William Christenberry’s abstract portraits of racialized history). All imagine a way out of these whitewashed, palimpsestic erasures of traumatic spectacle and consumption. Subsequent chapters make similar critical moves, each poised around a historical figure (chapter 2, Pocahontas/Matoaka; chapter 3, George Washington) who dwells in the echoes of his or her cultural afterlife: Neil Young’s “Pocahontas”; Disney-fied, Terrence Malick-ed, or Avatar-ed film visions; cryogenically frozen heads in an episode of Futurama; or an ultraviolet forensic lab at Mount Vernon laying claim to the physiognomy of Washington’s head, an unlikely metonym for what democracy was to look like in embodied form. Chapters 4 and 5 fall on each side of the Civil War, either in the need to create a new language capable of articulating the profound anxieties of enslavement in Stowe, Hawthorne, and Dickinson or “the counterstory to the Emancipation Proclamation” that traces the transnational identities and histories of free(d)men and women who are hidden in plain sight throughout the Global South (236).

Ersatz America is an ambitious book that weaves together strands of visual art, literature, film, music, dance, performance, public sites, and monuments in order to suture together ersatz performances and revisionary representations of democracy. Unifying the chapters and texts is Mark’s sustained meditation upon narrative itself. We are—we become—the stories we tell, both about ourselves and others. Mark has assembled a rich tapestry of such stories; at times I wished that she had dwelled even longer on some of them, engaging poetics of identity that express and function as “a meshwork of communal sanity” despite the prevalence of ersatz iconography (17). But...