Surveying Memory: The Past in Black and White

Surveying Memory:The Past in Black and White Larry J. Griffin (bio) and Peggy G. Hargis (bio) This much we know; the past is not really, can never be, past at all. It is recalcitrant, stubbornly refusing to go away or be discarded. It haunts recovery and sabotages amnesia. The past reminds—makes—us who we are and, sometimes, when we acknowledge that past, it also makes us wish we were not who we are. It fuels death and destruction, and it spurs acts of sacrifice and greatness. It renews, even, paradoxically, as it defies newness. In its inevitability, the past is always everywhere, persisting into the present and thus presaging the future. The past is memorialized in monuments, museums, days on the calendar, and sacred and quasi-sacred commemorative rituals; it is packaged and sold as heritage tourism; it is continually discussed, endlessly represented in various media, extensively used to judge the morality or immorality of today, and repeatedly drawn on as a repository of moral and practical lessons. To take only the most topical example of the last point—that is, the past as lesson—the first President Bush is reported to have said at the conclusion of the 1991 Gulf War: "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!" (qtd in Herring 104). Meanwhile, the second President Bush, now ensnared in another war in Iraq, is increasingly reminded, by critics and events alike, that the "Vietnam syndrome," like it or not, is alive and well and that the term "quagmire" perhaps [End Page 42] has more than mere historical resonance. So, to repeat, now quoting William Faulkner, "the past is never dead, it is not even past" (85). In their many guises, memory studies have insightfully exploited this existential, orienting truth, a truth perhaps best expressed by Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit. "Memory," he says, "is not knowledge of the past, it is knowledge from the past" (14). Not exactly the academic study of history—although it is often practiced with great skill by historians such as Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, David Blight, and John Bodnar—scholarly inquiry into memory, perhaps especially the exploration of collective and social memory, has proffered new questions about and interpretations of how individuals and collectivities are both constituted by the past and mobilize it for present-day projects. Place, purpose, and identity; the meaning of national symbols; collective guilt and personal shame; ethnic and racial conflict; the invention of traditions; repentance, reconciliation, and redemption—all of this and much more—now routinely motivate the research of a large and growing number of interdisciplinary memory scholars.1 Given that the American South, more than any other region in the country, visibly carries its sorrowful past on its shoulders, it is not surprising that the region has become a focus of memory research. The South's past is continually recreated and renewed from within and without in media, from the hundreds of newspaper articles across the nation reflecting on the horrors of racial segregation and the legacy of the civil rights movement, and films such as Mississippi Burning and Freedom Song, to the recent truth-and-reconciliation-type trials of perpetrators of civil rightsera assassinations and church bombings in Mississippi and Alabama, to the seemingly endless debate over the meaning and proper public role (if any) of such Confederate symbols as the St. Andrew's cross. It is a past, largely sanitized in some memory sites, which can be experienced in Williamsburg, Natchez, Charleston, New Orleans, San Antonio, and dozens of other towns and cities promoting heritage tourism. It is also a past, less sanitized to be sure, in Memphis, Atlanta, Birmingham, and Montgomery, in which one can not only experience what is no longer but can also witness to the world about what should have never been—a past of racial barbarism.2 The past, it seems, is always present in the South, and southerners repeatedly express genuine interest in their region's history. In a Southern Focus Poll, fielded by the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina during the fall of 1994, slightly more than two-thirds of all southerners strongly...