Remembering racial violence: memory movements and the resurgence of traumatic pasts

Remembering racial violence: memory movements and the resurgence of traumatic pasts Public Deposited

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Ghoshal, Raj Andrew
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Sociology

Abstract

Recent years have seen a marked resurgence of interest in America's racially violent past. But despite the growing presence of the country's racially violent past in present-day politics and culture, there has been little scholarship on the rise of efforts to address the legacies of long-buried violence. The mnemonic resurgence of historic racial violence raises a broader theoretical question: How do buried, traumatic pasts resurge to become morally and politically salient in the present? This three-paper format dissertation is the first systematic consideration of memory movements addressing historic racial violence. Following an introductory chapter, I describe the rise of these buried pasts and propose a set of hypotheses around memory movements more broadly. I then present analyses of the local-level emergence of memory movements around 1877-1954 racial violence. I conclude with a comparative analysis of why different projects have attained varying levels of impact.

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