Social Theory: Collective Memory

Bin XuAssistant Professor of Sociology and Asian

StudiesFlorida International University

Sub-nation Communities

• Community• Ethnic Group• Special Groups

John Bodnar

• Major arguments:1. Vernacular vs. official memory2. Carriers: “cultural leaders” and

“ordinary people”

John Bodnar

• Cases: 1. Local ethnic memories: Norwegian

Americans’ commemoration2. Regional memories3. National memories

Bodnar: Contributions and Problems

• Contribution: class distinction and memory

• Problems: 1. Dichotomy between “cultural leaders”

and “ordinary people”2. Equating cultural leaders with cultural

conformers3. Underdeveloped class-memory nexus

Ron Eyerman: Cultural Trauma and African American Identity

• Cultural trauma: “a memory accepted and publicly given credence by a relevant membership group and evoking an event or situation which is (a) laden with negative affect; (b) represented as indelible, and (c) regarded as threatening a society’s existence or violating one or more of its fundamental cultural presuppositions.”

• Individual and cultural trauma

Cultural Trauma

• Mediated representations (cultural objects) instead of direct experience

• The Role of Intellectuals

Civil Rights and Black Nationalism

• Context: the anti-colonial movements in Africa changed the image of Africa from a “primitive” continent to political advent garde

• Context: improvement of American blacks’ education and social status

• “Africa” was believed to be the American blacks’ homeland (compared to Jewish Zionism)

Malcolm X’s Religious Black Nationalism

• Video (Eyes on the Prize, 4:00-22:30)• Black nation: control over history

(forced forgetting and rediscovery of the African past)

• Slavery is something lived and living• Renaming: X (Ali)

History in Black and Red

• African Americans1. Collective past means more to African

Americans than whites (“I” and “we”)2. Important events

Table 6.1 An “event or period in the past that has most affected you”:

Event Black WhiteCivil Rights 22.4% 5.4%Slavery 11.2% 1.2%WWII 6.7% 12.5%MLK assassination 4.5% 0Assassinations of the 1960s

4.5% 0.6%

Vietnam 4.5% 11.3%JFK 1.5% 8.3%

He is no father to me…

• “This has always been a stickler with me . . . the reference to George Washington being the father of the country. . . . Being black, he is no father to me. . . . When it is put that way—‘the father of our country’—that has no meaning to me. The first president, I can understand that, but the father of our country, no. Then, another thing: Abraham Lincoln—my perception of the Emancipation Proclamation— freeing the slaves—was only done to win the war. They needed bodies and who was on the front line? The black troops.”

Cultural Objects and Sites

• Roots• Autobiography of Malcolm X• Mississippi Burning• MLK Museum • School history distorted or lied about

black experience

The Oglala Sioux

• Ten times as likely as white Americans to describe ethnic and racial history as important to their identity; higher than African Americans.

• Almost two thirds name Wounded Knee massacre (1890), occupation of Wounded Knee (1973), and the confinement of Native Americans to reservations.

• http://www.history.com/topics/native-american-history/wounded-knee

The Oglala Sioux: Cultural Objects, Sites, and Heroes• The Crazy Horse

Mountain• The Wounded

Knee massacre site

• The Sioux Indian Museum

• Hero: Crazy Horse

The Oglala Sioux: Historical Narratives

• “opposite to” the mainstream:1. Not 1492 but before2. The start of genocide instead of discovery

of America3. Nothing to celebrate on the Fourth of July

because of no independence4. Lincoln? He ordered to wipe out Indians!5. High school history? BS

The AIDS Memorial Quilt

The AIDS Memorial Quilt

• Cleve Jones and NAMES Project• As both a national memorial and a

grassroots memorial• Why names are important?• Why public display?• Why on the Mall in Washington?• Vernacular or official?

The AIDS Memorial Quilt

• “To be moral, say the quilt panels, is to state a name in the face of discrimination; to be responsible, they say, is to care for the dying.” (p.219)

• The moral issue of commemoration: Victim? Moral failure?