Memory, History and Place
Moderator: Mary Corbin Sies (American Studies, University of Maryland)
Mythos, Memory and History: African American Art as Material Culture
Aaron Bryant (American Studies, University of Maryland)
In his article, “Myth, History, and Literature in Virgin Land ,” Alan Trachtenberg cites Carl Becker to argue that history is “the artificial extension of the social memory.” In many ways, this idea may hold true for certain examples of art. Although one can argue there are problems with Trachtenberg's thesis, this presentation considers ways that certain art uses and becomes a form of material culture or historical text that “symbolize experiences.” These “symbols” represent “myths” that give individual works of art meaning.
In looking at the work of artists like August Wilson, Romare Bearden and John Holyfield, for example, we see how each artist creates connections between their art and versions of myth, history and cultural memory. Similar kinds of connections are drawn by artists like Alvin Ailey with his ballet Revelations , Toni Morrison with Beloved , Alice Walker with T he Color Purple , and Wynton Marsalis with his composition Blood on the Battlefields .
The presentation's title was inspired by Fath Davis Ruffins' “Mythos, Memory, and History: African American Preservation Efforts 1820-1990.” Ruffins' essay encompasses many of the ideas that Wilson, Bearden and Holyfield articulate as being the muse and meaning behind their work. Additionally, for the purposes of this presentation, Ruffins' essay offers an interesting ideological vocabulary and framework for discussing museum scholarship, art, and material culture.
Remembering Andersonville : The Contested Landscape of a Civil War Prison Camp
Mark Barron (American Studies, University of Maryland)
Located in Southwest Georgia , Andersonville served as a prison camp for Union soldiers during the American Civil War. Of the 30,000 prisoners who entered the gates, over one third never left. When the Union Army liberated the camp in 1865, the conditions were so deplorable that the camp's commander was tried and executed for war crimes.
After the war, northern commemorative groups descended upon the former prison site to erect monuments and to rebury the dead. In the town of Andersonville , just a half mile a way, white southerners began to claim that the events at the prison were exaggerated or even contrived.
The debates over how Andersonville prison should be remembered and interpreted for a tourist audience were settled in the 1990s, when the National Park Service rededicated the site as the National Prisoner of War Memorial. The new Andersonville highlighted the personal struggles prisoners endured during World War II , Korea , and Vietnam . The events of Andersonville prison were relegated to one wall entitled the “Civil War.”
This paper will explore the contested landscape of Andersonville and how opposing sides have attempted to influence its presentation. This paper will also draw upon the works of David Lowenthal and his discussion of public memorialization, James Mayo's recent work with war memorials, William Richardson's study of Confederate landscapes, and James Cobb's work detailing the formation of a white southern male identity.
Place, Practice, and Postmodernity: A Cultural Landscape Study of the Takoma Park Farmers' Market
Kirsten Crase (American Studies, University of Maryland)
This paper explores the Takoma Park Farmers' Market as a cultural landscape. What are the discourses, practices, and materialities that give life to this cultural institution and the landscape it creates? It is my goal in this paper to explore the ways in which the Takoma Park Farmers' Market landscape embodies particular intersections and overlappings between people, places, objects, ideas, the built environment, and the natural environment.
The fieldwork for this paper was conducted using Jeremy Korr's cultural landscape study model, which posits cultural landscapes as representing a triangular relationship between humans, artifacts, and nature, and which outlines a five-step cultural landscape study fieldwork model. On the basis of the data gleaned from my application of Korr's fieldwork model, I have suggested six cultural landscape perspectives by which we can usefully examine the Takoma Park Farmers' Market—that of a mobile and multi-centered landscape, a consumer landscape, a civic landscape, a place-based landscape, a nature-based landscape, and an aesthetic landscape. By no means exhaustive, these perspectives nonetheless reflect a number of the complex discourses and materialities that shape the market landscape. I argue ultimately that the flexible nature of the farmers' market landscape allows us to broaden and complicate our traditional understandings of such concepts as place and practice, and that it suggests the quintessentially postmodern character of the Takoma Park Farmers' Market. The Takoma Park Farmers' Market reflects postmodernity in its confusion and juxtaposition of times and places, in its embodiment of diversity and polyphony of all kinds, in its interconnectedness with other systems and discourses, and in its self-conscious desire to borrow from multiple traditions and multiple imagined pasts in order to shape itself into an idealized form.