Tag: public memory

  • Heritage and Memory: The NAMES Project Quilt

    Heritage and Memory: The NAMES Project Quilt

    Sophie Loftus, a second year History student at the University of Portsmouth, has written the following blog entry on Cleve Jones’ NAMES Project Quilt for the Introduction to Historical Research module. Sophie discusses how the quilt acts as an important memorial to the people who lost their lives to AIDS, while at the same time challenging social and cultural understandings of the disease. The module is co-ordinated by Dr Maria Cannon, Lecturer in Early Modern History at Portsmouth.

    In 1989, activist Cleve Jones stood in front of the White House with a message. Jones stated: ‘We bring a quilt. We hope it will help people to remember. We hope it will teach our leaders to act.’ [1] In that year, with limited response or recognition from its government, the death toll from AIDS in the United States of America – not simply homosexual men, but also heterosexual women, children and men – already stood at almost 90,000. Some three years earlier, in 1986, Jones realised that the dead in San Francisco from HIV/AIDS had already reached 1000 people. At the annual march, held in honour of Harvey Milk on the anniversary of his assassination, Jones asked members of the march to put the names of those lost on placards as a form of remembrance. These were then hung on the side of the old federal building. The effect reminded Jones of a quilt, something familial, cosy, handed down through generations for warmth and memory. [2] Jones wanted to create a memorial to those who had died from AIDS. In the Quilt, Jones argued that he wanted to take AIDS from ‘a “gay disease” into a shared national tragedy.’ [3] By the time the NAMES Project Quilt was displayed on the Mall in Washington DC in October 1987, as part of the National March for Lesbian and Gay rights, there were almost 2000 panels. [4] As of June 2016, The AIDS Memorial quilt makes up more than 49,000 panels, each one to commemorate someone lost to HIV/AIDS. [5] This blog looks to examine the power of collective memory and remembrance and how historians can engage with these sources to understand the power of memory not just as a source, but also as a subject. [6]

    The AIDS quilt. Image from Wikipedia.

    Arthur Marwick argued that the definition of a primary document was one which ‘by its very existence records that some event took place.’ [7] However, it must be argued that when historians are looking at other types of sources for historical importance, by simply reducing an object to little more than evidence, this can remove any form of emotive understanding of an event. [8] Sarah Barber argued that each type of source has ‘its own history which overlaps and influences those of other sources.’ [9] Here, the AIDS memorial Quilt can be seen as a useful tool in the understanding of other forms of source doing the work of memorialisation. Elaine Showalter, argues that the Quilt is seen as a ‘metaphor of national identity.’ [10] Cleve Jones, in the Quilt, attempted to represent familial bonds. By creating a memorial to the sheer size of the AIDS problem in the United States, he wanted to create a ‘way for survivors to work through their grief in a positive, creative way.’ [11] By attempting to create a positive representation of the AIDS epidemic, Jones may not have realised that he was also tapping into the ways in which scholars had begun to understand that there was a violence to the 20th century, which meant that people attempting to understand and process grief would require new ways to do this. [12]

    In the 1920s, Maurice Halbwach argued that collective memory was a ‘product of social frameworks.’ [13] He argued that history was the recording that remained once social memory faded away, and that ‘there is only one history.’ [14] However, this cannot be seen to be true; when understanding collective memory, one must understand that as a source, it is as unreliable as any other due to its potentially personal nature. The Quilt is a highly emotive piece, and some members of the LGBT community argued that it was too sanitised in its remembrance. Douglas Crimp argued that AIDS Activism hinged on how the gay community wished to be remembered, or how the crisis was intended to be seen: whether it was a disease ‘that has simply struck at this time and in this place – or as the result of gross political negligence.’ [15] Some members of the LGBT community argued that the Quilt was simply making the problem more palatable to heterosexual viewers. Thus, Marwick’s theory cannot be substantiated, collective memory cannot be seen as one history, for memory can be to some, a moment for grief and mourning, and for others a call to action and activism. [16]

    Scholars such as Bill Niven have argued that collective memory can be fruitful in understanding the way in which states and governments have attempted to encourage groups to certain views. [17] The AIDS Memorial Quilt however, is a vital example of how collective memory can challenge this. At the time of its conception, the American government were doing everything in its power to ignore AIDS. President Ronald Reagan did not mention the word AIDS on television until 1986, by which point almost 15,000 people had died of the disease. It is here that it can be seen that collective memory, or what John Bodnar has called ‘vernacular culture’ is crucial in describing the way in which groups form ways which ‘reflect how they want to remember historical events’. [18] This can be important for underrepresented groups who wish to control the narrative surrounding the memory of their own. The Quilt can be seen as what Mary Fulbrook describes as a ‘remembering agent’, or as what Jennifer Power calls a ‘counter memorial’, a piece of history which can be seen as not only a political protest, but also arguably showcasing the human side of the AIDS crisis. [19] It is not as some memorials, including those also represented at the Mall where the first showing of the quilt was presented, are normally envisioned. It is not made of stone, it moves and grows. The Quilt travels the nation and the world, in an attempt to challenge social and cultural understandings of AIDS.

    The Quilt was nominated in 1989 for a Nobel Peace Prize, and is the largest community art project in the world. [20] Cleve Jones created a memorial that grows every day, and can easily challenge historians regarding appropriate representations of remembrance. While some historians argue about the validity of collective memory as a source due to its potentially unreliable nature, the Quilt shows that counter memorials and representations of collective memory can be so important in understanding underrepresented history. They can place in the hands of historians and the world the ability to understand a past and a present which for some will never be memorialised in stone, but that people still require to grieve, to process, and to remember.

    NOTES

    [1] Cleve Jones, When We Rise: My life in the Movement. (London: Constable, 2017). 194.

    [2] Peter S. Hawkins, “Naming Names: The Art of Memory and the NAMES Project AIDS Quilt,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Summer, 1993). 752-779.

    [3] Hawkins, Naming. 752-779.

    [4] Ibid.

    [5] The NAMES Project, “AIDS Memorial Quilt FAQs”. https://www.aidsquilt.org/about/faqs, last accessed 11 April 2019.

    [6] Joan Tumblety, “Introduction: working with memory as source and subject” in Memory and History: Understanding Memory as Source and Subject. ed. Joan Tumblety. (London: Routledge, 2013). 1-17.

    [7] Sarah Barber and Corinna M. Peniston-Bird, “Introduction” in History beyond the text: A Students guide to approaching alternative sources. ed. Sarah Barber and Corinna M. Peniston-Bird. (London: Routledge, 2009). 1-13.

    [8] Barber, Beyond. 1-13.

    [9] Ibid.

    [10] Elaine Showalter, Sister’s choice: tradition and change in American women’s writing. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1991). 169.

    [11] Ibid.

    [12] Tublety, Memory. 1-17.

    [13] Bill Niven and Stefan Berger, “Introduction” in Writing the History of Memory. ed Bill Niven and Stefan Berger, (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 1-25.

    [14] Ibid.

    [15] Douglas Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy,” The MIT Press, Vol 51, (Winter 1989): 3-18.

    [16] Jennifer Power, Movement, Knowledge, Emotion: Gay activism and HIV/AIDS in Australia. (Canberra: ANU Press, 2011). 157.

    [17] Niven, Writing. 1-25.

    [18] Ibid.

    [19] Mary Fulbrook, “History Writing and ‘collective memory’” in Writing the History of Memory. ed Bill Niven and Stefan Berger, (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 65-88; Power, Movement, 148.

    [20] The NAMES Project, “AIDS Memorial Quilt Background.” https://www.aidsquilt.org/about/medianewsroom, last accessed 11 April 2019.


  • How to ‘forget’ difficult pasts: slavery, memory, and the maritime frame

    How to ‘forget’ difficult pasts: slavery, memory, and the maritime frame

    In Theresa May’s ‘Brexit speech’, on January 17th 2017, the prime minister suggested that Britain’s “history and culture is profoundly internationalist” [1]. This is certainly one way of framing Britain’s historic relationship with the rest of the world. Alternatively, you might suggest that May spelt “centuries of colonial rule, oppression, slavery and genocide” wrong. As cultural sociologist Iwona Irwin-Zarecka argues, the range of possible interpretations of historic events and themes can be limited through processes of ‘framing’ [2]. Such ‘framing’ doesn’t necessarily block out other possible interpretations, but it does act to restrict the range of meanings. The past can be ‘framed’ in certain ways, and certain interpretations and narratives can be promoted over others in ways which obscure less palatable aspects through specific, and active, memory-work: through commemorative ceremonies, memorial design, and yes, political speeches.

    There have been a series of public history interventions recently which have sought to re-engage with some of the so-called ‘forgotten’ sides of the more horrific stories of the history of the British Empire. Britain’s long and meticulously organised involvement in transatlantic slavery has come to light publicly through the work of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership  project at UCL, and the accompanying documentaries presented by David Olusoga, titled, ominously, ‘Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners’ [3]. The problem with the use of the term ‘forgetting’ here is that it just doesn’t capture how much effort it takes to ‘re-frame’ a history as brutal and horrific as, for example, empire into something as progressive-sounding as, say,  ‘internationalism’. Forgetting certain aspects of a nation’s past takes work. Forgetting something as epic as transatlantic slavery and the slave trade, something which saw the transportation of 12 million African people, four centuries of trade in human beings, isn’t something that’s easy to ‘forget’ by letting it slip the collective mind, like a careless omission. This isn’t the ‘dude, where’s my car?’ of historical memory [4]. Saying that transatlantic slavery has been ‘forgotten’ just doesn’t do justice to the lengths people have gone to obscure this history, reworking the memory of slavery into the memory of its abolition, for example, through the valorising of heroes (William Wilberforce) and the celebration of key dates (1807, 1833/34)[5].  This distinctly active process might better be termed an ‘organised forgetting’ [6] or an ‘unremembering’ [7] to indicate the work needed to obscure certain pasts.

    One of the ways in which the connections between British history and transatlantic slavery have been forgotten in an organised way, is through the framing of this past through a distinctly ‘maritime’ lens. Helpfully, this also chimes well with national identity narratives about Britain’s maritime Empire and prowess, Britannia ruling the waves, commanding the seven seas, in images sometimes coupled with comforting national narratives of abolition; of Britain being a country “that took slavery off the high seas” as David Cameron once put it [8]. The ‘maritimization’ of the history of Britain and slavery, as John Beech has argued, has placed a focus on the slave trade rather than enslavement more broadly, severing connections to land-based plantations in foreign lands (safely at a distance) or to legacies closer to home, on British soil, like industrialisation or material culture (pretty Georgian squares and decadent country houses for example).

    In Liverpool, the largest of Europe’s slave-trading ports, responsible for the transportation of over 1.1 million enslaved African people across the perilous ‘middle passage’ [9], this ‘maritimization’ is a process which has been embroiled within maritime-themed civic identity narratives. Historically, the city’s relationship with the sea flooded imperial connections with a language of romanticism within, that “[h]er ships sail on every sea, and the produce of every land under the sun finds its way to her Docks,” as one guide put it in 1902 [10]. In 1957, Liverpool’s 750th ‘birthday’ (marking 750 years since the signing of the King John charter of 1207), the appositely named Derek Whale wrote of the “romantic age of trading pioneers under sail” who brought back “[t]ales of strange customs and people of foreign lands, where lay the white man’s treasures in silks, cotton, ivory, oil, wine and spices,” [11] – and presumably also African people themselves, not included in this list of exotic foreign treasures. Commemorative occasions such as civic birthday parties are an important time for active ‘framing’ of dissonant pasts, which clash with objectives of promoting positive celebrations of local identity narratives. Similarly, museums can play important roles in forging authoritative narratives of the past, even before they exist. In Liverpool, public discourse around the construction of the long-awaited maritime museum reinforced romanticised narratives of sea-based identity narratives with notable omissions, focusing instead on “childhood memories of the romance of Britain’s second seaport.” [12] Criticisms were made of panel text when the museum did open, the 1989 Gifford Report into race relations in Liverpool, produced after the riots of the 1980s, described discussion of Liverpool and the slave trade as “a lawyer’s plea for mitigation” [13]. Even when the new International Slavery Museum opened in Liverpool in 2007, its status as an independent museum, irked some. “Slavery should be covered as part of the Maritime Museum (as it was), not as a free-standing museum” complained one online commenter, with another using this maritime context and perceived rightful place of slavery in the maritime museum to downplay the significance of the slave trade to Liverpool’s history, “[if] ever there was a statement that slavery was not the only thing that made the city rich it is that.” [14]

     

    Goree Warehouses, engraving, copy (1822)

     

    The thing about memory, rather than remembrance [15] is that it doesn’t always abide by the organised rules of active forgetting. As much as the authoritative, ‘organised’ framing of slavery through a maritime lens may act to obscure the breadth and depth of this history through displacement, distancing and downplaying, this ‘maritimization’ can also reveal human realities and consequences of a history left otherwise muddied in the Mersey. In Liverpool, maritimized connections to the city’s past reveal themselves through  mythologies surrounding ‘slaves in Liverpool’. Stories of a slave presence, though dissonant and contested, hook onto places which run along the memory of the 18th century river Mersey’s edge, before it was pushed back by later dock construction on reclaimed land. Such stories ‘hook’ in particular onto the historic site of Goree, eighteenth century warehouses named after an island off the coast of Senegal, the largest slave-trading centre on the African coast, and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site [16]. Though demolished in the 1950s, Goree warehouses have continued to be the imaginative site of memory where an otherwise romanticised and obscured history of the trade in human beings is remembered. Stories of enslaved people shipped, sold, and chained to rings at the site, historical evidence unearthed in cellars around Goree, and obscure sculptures which commemorate the water’s edge, all simultaneously reveal and obscure the mythologies of slaves in Liverpool. As much as maritimizing has ‘framed’ the history of slavery as something seabound and distanced, maritime connections, made at the places where the land of Liverpool meets the water of the Mersey, have dislodged this frame, turned it backwards, revealing human connections.

     

     

    Dr Jessica Moody is Lecturer in Modern History and Heritage. If you want to read more, this research is published in Moody, “ ‘Liverpool’s local tints’: Drowning Memory and Maritimizing Slavery in a Seaport City”, in Katie Donington, Ryan Hanley and Jessica Moody (eds.) Britain’s History and Memory of Transatlantic Slavery: local nuances of a ‘national sin’ (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016). This edited collection brings together essays considering localised case studies of Britain and transatlantic slavery in history and memory. http://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/products/80782

     

    Notes

     

    [1] Theresa May. Speech about Britain leaving the European Union January 17th 2017. See full text here: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/full-text-theresa-may-brexit-speech-global-britain-eu-european-union-latest-a7531361.html [accessed January 24 2017]

    [2] Irwin-Zarecka, Iwona. Frames of Remembrance : The Dynamics of Collective Memory. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1994.

    [3] ‘Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners’ BBC 2 (2015); see also David Olusoga, “The History of British Slave Ownership Has Been Buried: Now its Scale Can Be Revealed”, The Guardian, 12 July 2015; http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/

    [4] For younger, and/or more culturally sophisticated readers, Dude Where’s My Car? Was a 2000 film starring Ashton Kutcher and Seann William Scott in which two ‘dudes’ forget where they parked their car after a heavy night.

    [5] See John Oldfield. Chords of Freedom: Commemoration, Ritual and British Transatlantic Slavery (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007)

    [6] Paul Connerton. How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)

    [7] Sinfree Makoni, “African Languages as European Scripts: The Shaping of Communal Memory,” in Sarah Nuttal and Carli Coetzee (eds) Negotiating the Past: The Making of Meaning in South Africa (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1998) pp. 242-48

    [8] David Cameron, in a speech responding to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s comments about Britain’s diminishing global influence. George Parker and Elizabeth Rigby. “Cameron goes on offensive after ‘small island’ jibe”, Financial Times September 6, 2013

    [9] Kenneth Morgan, “Liverpool’s Dominance in the British Slave Trade, 1740-1807” in David Richardson, Anthony Tibbles and Suzanne Schwarz (eds), Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007) p. 15

    [10] A New Guide to Liverpool (Liverpool: Littlebury Brothers, 1902) p. 133

    [11] Derek Whale, “Fishing Village to a Great Seaport” City of Liverpool Charter Celebrations 1207-1957: Evening Express Charter Supplement, Liverpool Evening Express, June 17, 1957.

    [12] Peter Rockliffe, “Special…the Launching of the Maritime Museum” Trident, 2 (1980)

    [13] Lord Gifford QC (Chair), Wally Brown and Ruth Bundey, Loosen the Shackles: First Report of the Liverpool 8 Inquiry into Race Relations in Liverpool (London: Karia Press, 1989)

    [14] Liverpolitan, comment on ‘International Museum of Slavery,” Skyscraper City Forum, 16 September 2007 (6:30pm) www.skyscrapercity.com ; Buggedboy, comment on Skyscraper City Forum 18 September 2007

    [15] Jay Winter and Emmannuel Sivan distinguish between these two terms in order to highlight the organised, post-living memory status of acts of remembrance. See Jay Winter and Emmannuel Sivan, “Setting the Framework” in Winter and Sivan (eds) War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)

    [16] http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/26