Rhetorics Haunting the National Mall: Displaced and Ephemeral Public Memories ed. by Roger C. Aden (review)

There are many words visitors to the National Mall use to characterize the famous two miles of commemorative landscape that have become the catwalk of national memory production in Washington, DC, ever since Pierre Charles L'Enfant planned a Grand Avenue for the new capitol in 1791.

But "haunted"?

This volume, edited by Roger C. Aden, addresses the dark side of this radiant place, its "displaced and ephemeral public memories." Through a "rhetorical séance" the authors hope to productively reshape "our understanding of the soul of the nation, and that such efforts will generate changes in how the Mall tells the story of the United States of America" (11). The book does so in eleven contributions, written by an interdisciplinary group of scholars with their main expertise lying in geography and communications, using concepts and methods rooted in anthropology, history, memory studies, and discourse analysis.

Readers encounter "uneasy legacies of protest, dissent and violence in American memory" (53–70), and they are invited to think about "the history of the civil rights movement as radical place-making" (71–92), or engage with "the portrait monument's emblematic and tortured history" (135–152). The contributors set out to unearth the discursively missing in a significant place of public memory production by connecting the material qualities of the most prominent national monument of the United States with historic texts and images. The authors approach national identity discourses on the grounds of the spatial turn, addressing mostly academic readers.

To this end, they introduce the figure of the ghost and the metaphor of haunting. The topics unfurled in the two sections of the volume, named "affective presence of ephemeral memories" and the "faint traces of deflected memories," (15, 93) mainly engage with the experiences of those who might be addressed as the classic staff of social history: unemployed workers and unpaid soldiers, women, and minorities seeking their rights. The authors illustrate the impact of gender ("patriarchy"), race ("slavery" and "racial injustice") and class ("neoliberalism" and "economic inequality") not only on people's past experience, but also on the memorialization and forgetting of these events.

The vocabulary of ghosts, séances, and haunting links the book to the "spectral turn" which describes a certain kind of memory as "haunting."¹ For the last ten years, haunting has become a means scholars employ to reveal what has elsewhere been termed "difficult knowledge."² At the core of such work lies the task of representing stories about violence in a post-traumatic, post-conflict social context. Just as the presence of a ghost interrupts everyday life's certainties, the operative function of haunting in the process of knowledge production and cultural self-understanding is to be a tool of interruption, usually of hegemonic discourse.³ As in other scholarship engaged in the spectral turn, the book uses the master metaphor of the ghost as go-between in order to bring "counter-voluntary memory"⁴ which is "usually a symptom of a deep crisis"⁵ to the fore. And indeed, Rhetorics Haunting the National Mall indexes the topics that provoke crisis as much as it simultaneously offers tools to reveal them: the needs and perspectives of women, non-white people, and working class Americans. Lastly, in congruence with Sasha Handley, the authors try to "invest the ghost with emancipatory potential,"⁶ such as when they grant it the power to "reveal a longing for making something right" (217).

Concerned with the "soul of the nation" and aiming for "change" on and maybe even through the Mall, Aden hopes that the individual chapters will direct the readers toward an intellectual and affective confrontation with national memory politics, a process which he calls a séance. In his concluding remarks he writes: "these stories remind us that we're far from perfect, that we should own all our actions, and that what we choose to...