Lifting the Shadow: Reshaping Memory, Race, and Slavery in U.S. Museums

by Amy Sodaro

Overview

Lifting the Shadow: Reshaping Memory, Race, and Slavery in U.S. Museums examines a small but significant wave of new U.S. memorial museums that focus on slavery and its ongoing violent legacies, including the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Montgomery’s Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, and Greenwood Rising, which commemorates the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. These museums are challenging historical narratives of slavery and race by placing racial oppression at the center of American history and linking historical slavery to contemporary racial injustice, but they have opened in a period marked by growing racial tension, white nationalism, and political division. Sodaro examines how the violence of U.S. slavery and its lasting legacies is negotiated in these museums, as well as their potential to contribute to the development of a more critical historical memory of race in the U.S. at this particularly volatile sociopolitical moment.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781978842632
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	11/15/2024
Series:	Genocide, Political Violence, Human Rights
Pages:	194
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	16 - 18 Years

About the Author

Amy Sodaro is an associate professor of sociology at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. She is the author of Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence (Rutgers University Press 2018) and coeditor of Museums and Sites of Persuasion: Politics, Memory and Human Rights and Museums and Mass Violence: Perils and Potential.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Memory in Post-Postracial America 1
1 Race and Memory in the United States: A Shifting Memorial Landscape 13
2 Telling “America’s Story”: The National Museum of African American History and Culture 37
3 “Shine the Light of Truth”: The Legacy Museum 63
4 “After a Century of Silence”: Greenwood Rising 89
5 America’s New Memorial Museums 112
Conclusion: Memory’s Present and Future 135
Acknowledgments 151
Notes 153
References 163
Index 181


Introduction                         
1          Race and Memory in the US: A Shifting Memorial Landscape                   
2          Telling “America’s Story”: National Museum of African American History and Culture         
3          “Shining the light of truth”: The Legacy Museum                                               
4          “After a century of silence”: Greenwood Rising Historical Center                                             
5          America’s New Memorial Museums
6          Conclusion: Memory’s Present and Future                                              
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography                                                                                                                   
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Amy Sodaro’s accessibly written, thoughtful, and timely comparative study of three pivotal U.S. museums shows that they manage to link historical slavery with contemporary racial injustice to varying degrees. Most importantly, she argues that memorial museums have a responsibility in democratic societies, to not only point out and situate oppression in the historical past but highlight its ongoing structural embeddedness in our present."

author of Mediating Memory in the Museum: Empathy, Trauma, Nostalgia - Silke Arnold-de Simine

"Lifting the Shadow is a path-breaking work and provides readers with eye-opening analyses of how four relatively recent U.S. memorial museums rethink and represent the complicated, violent, and often ignored history and repercussions of U.S. slavery and racism. This well-timed volume will be a valuable asset in the classroom for specialists as well as a public audience interested in issues of race, history, and representation."

president of the Institute for the Study of Genocide - Joyce Apsel

"How is the United States grappling with its difficult pasts and engaging with histories that make us uncomfortable? Lifting the Shadow examines the extraordinary memory museums that have been built in the early twenty-first century, museums that demand of the nation a reckoning with the difficult pasts of slavery and racism, museums that shape historical engagement in ways that would not have been possible before. Amy Sodaro shows us that despite the polarization and political retrenchment of our times, these museums point with hope toward new ways of living with difficult pasts and being in America."

author of Terrorism in American Memory: Memorials, Museums, and Architecture in the Post-9/11 Era - Marita Sturken