Introduction: Reading History, Memory, and Forgetting

Author(s): Minrose Gwin

Source: The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. 40, No. 2, Special Issue: History, Memory, and
Mourning (Spring, 2008), pp. 1-10
Published by: University of North Carolina Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20077901
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 Introduction: Reading History,
Memory, and Forgetting
the dead must be mourned and sung over
and prayers told them to carry to the other side.
the dead must be chanted and marched to their tombs
and the tombs then tended and the dogs kept away.
? Brenda Marie Osbey, "Faubourg"1

Cultural memory and mourning kept alive through writings

and stories are as much spatial as temporal; they exist in both the past
and the present, yet they move us toward a future that will inevitably
become the past. What kind of future will that be, and what kind of his
tory will it produce? As the "remembered history"2 of the American South
has become an integral part of global thinking about human-inflicted
carnage and trauma and questions of justice, responsibility, and ethical
intervention, many scholars in U.S. southern studies have followed the
lead of southern writers in approaching the past with a heightened sense
of urgency and an eye to a future in which regional and national affilia
tions fade in the shadow of global concerns. Especially in the past decade,
Kelly Oliver's belief that "we need to find the conditions of the possibil
ity for justice?for the impossible to become possible in the future?in
the past" may have come to seem especially compelling to contemporary
southern writers and scholars of southern literature who enter, remember,
and sometimes mourn the past. In a reversal of causality, Oliver argues
that "only by reading the conditions of the possibility of that future into
the past. . . can we open alternatives to the present" (47). In this sense of
rethinking history for the sense of possibility it contains, this SLJ special
issue on history, memory, and mourning in southern literature is as much

Southern Literary Journal, volume XL, number 2, spring 2008

? 2008 by the Southern Literary Journal and the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill Department of English and Comparative Literature. All rights reserved.

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 2 Southern Literaryjournal

about the future of southern studies as it is about the remembered past of

a region whose borders are less situated than ever.
The cultural space of the U.S. South has long served as an American
repository of disapprobation and mourning, one that can be grounded
in removals and diasporas, forced unpaid labor, human interventions
in family structures, and violent deeds and institutions. This archive of
southern history has been summoned, manipulated, and disavowed for
nationalistic purposes, yet its traces linger. Well into the twenty-first cen
tury, race violence and racial division still mark a postmodern South of
K-Marts and satellite dishes and shopping malls. Contemporary events
such as the infamous, familiar noose hanging from a tree claimed by
white students at a high school in Jena, Louisiana, reverberate back
through southern history, gathering a psychological momentum that car
ries with it the imaginative reconstruction of other crimes long past and
an avalanche of disavowal and mourning. There is a coalescence of cul
tural memory around such contemporary moments; it is impossible to
think of these violent encounters and the places where they occur as dis
sociated from southern history or literature.
Although such events themselves may be situated in the southeastern
region of the United States, the cultural memories that are their living
traces lie at the heart of American consciousness and contemporary global
concerns, although, as Larry J. Griffin and Peggy G. Hargis's research
shows, what is remembered depends on who's doing the remembering.
In her introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Cathy Caruth
suggests that, in an age of catastrophe, trauma itself?and, one might
add, a history of trauma?may indeed provide a primary link between
cultures (n). One question this special issue raises is whether and/or how
these historically and imaginatively imbued cultural memories that are
unique to the U.S. South may shape a sense of relation and responsibil
ity to global issues, past and present, of massive human-inflected trauma.
Many of the essays in this volume address this question either implicitly
or explicitly. For example, in marking a linkage between the traumatic
history of the South and the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, Lisa
Hinrichsen's study of Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country illustrates how
the novel "interrogates the role memorialization plays in repressing the
truth of the past and powerfully raises questions of both southern and
national memorial practices." These practices, as stripped bare in Mason's
novel, form "complex systems of historical remembrance, consumption,
and erasure."

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 Reading History, Memory, and Forgetting 3

Diana Taylor has noted that cultural memory "is, among other things,
a practice, an act of imagination and interconnection" which is mapped
by social groupings that share historical commonalities and embodied
experience (82). Most of the writings in this special issue not only empha
size the practice of memory within the aesthetic realm but also suggest
that how these social groupings are constituted in the first place may well
involve imagination and aesthetics, as well as history and lived experi
ence. Many of these essays foreground the aesthetic challenges and ethi
cal complexities of fiction, poetry, memoir, drama, and film in the con
text of the American South's vexed and vexing history. Those that don't
focus on southern history per se engage ideas about cultural memory
and history and (in Jonathan Imber Shaw's study of Cormac McCarthy's
Blood Meridian for example) consider how texts may carry the burdens of
more than one history, each commenting on and complicating the other.
Simply put, these essays, despite their obvious differences in discipline,
subject, and form, examine stories about the past, cultural conduits of
memory or "acts of transfer"3 that mold, pass along, and sometimes enact
cultural memory. In their very southern emphasis on localization and
specificity, the pieces in this issue inevitably reshape much-debated and
often circumlocutory questions around human-inflicted trauma, cultural
mourning and memorialization, and aesthetic production.
While many of the scholars represented in this issue call upon mem
ory studies in developing their ideas, it also may be argued that southern
studies, in its concerns not only with a traumatic past but specific loca
tions and sites of that past, offers memory studies, which tends toward
the general, and trauma studies, which has solidified into contentious
oppositions around questions of trauma's contagion and proliferation, a
sense of place and a grounding in the specific. Aesthetic production?and
its ebullient though vexed affiliation with memory, history, and mourn
ing?seems very much at the ethical hinge of these issues. As Michael
Rossington notes, the artificial distinction between public history and
private memory has been reconceived "through the explicit invocation of
a textual practice in which the reader is asked to participate"; thus col
lective memory is being s n by certain contemporary memory scholars
as "at root, a dimension of literary, or literary-cultural studies" (137).4 A
number of the writers in this issue ask, explicitly or implicitly, whether or
to what degree mourning and testimony require the embodiment found
in aesthetic forms?how such imaginary embodiment may lead readers
toward larger ongoing questions of justice through the re-membering of

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 4 Southern Literaryjournal

a regional and national history of racial trauma and cultural mourning,

which has been and still is assaulted as fiction itself. As Jennifer D. Wil
liams points out in her compelling study of the erotics of mourning in
Jean Toomer's Cane, "[t]he written narrative of racial history is always
already embodied. . . . Reclaiming the past involves remembering the
body as a historical text..."
Much work on these larger questions of human-inflicted trauma,
cultural mourning, and aesthetic production already has been done in
trauma studies and memory studies. Yet, despite the persistence of schol
arly attentiveness to southern writing about the past, there remains a need
for specific frames of reference or, as Iwona Irwin-Zarecka has put it, for
"frames of remembrance" which set analytical parameters around ques
tions of collective memory, especially of racial trauma experienced by
southern African Americans (9). Such parameters are especially impor
tant in U.S. southern studies, because, as Griffin and Hargis's research so
clearly shows, the border between what is remembered and what is for
gotten in the U.S. has been vehemently, if not indelibly, drawn along race
lines, not regional distinction.
Just as the scope of U.S. southern literary studies, especially in the
areas this issue addresses, has become more interdisciplinary and multi
disciplinary, so too has the field become increasingly transnational.
Pearl McHaney's tracings of the intersections between Eudora Welty's
Losing Battles and Sindiwe Magona's Mother to Mother, Shaw's connec
tions between "Evil Empires" in his study of Cormac McCarthy's Blood
Meridian, as well as Ruth Salvaggio's reading of the haunting historical
layers of a Creole slave song in the context of loss and mourning in post
Katrina New Orleans, weave rich, intertextual histories through complex
analyses of specific texts. In general, the scholars represented in this vol
ume work in an interdisciplinary frame, drawing insights from the con
temporary fields of memory studies and trauma studies. From a historical/
sociological perspective, Griffin and Hargis's "Surveying Memory: The
Past in Black and White" offers literary scholars valuable insight into
the yawning racial divide in cultural memory, as well as the volumi
nous amount of scholarship in the burgeoning field of memory studies.
As Griffin and Hargis point out, the South's always visible "sorrowful
past"?a past, one might add, that is decidedly transnational?has made
it an important focus of memory research, which is by its very nature
interdisciplinary and transnational. Drawing on the large body of work
in memory studies are also Sari Edelsteins discussion of the phenomenon
of "postmemory" in Katherine Anne Porter's Old Mortality and Daniel

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 Reading History, Memory, and Forgetting 5

Turner's work on "metanostalgia" and "critical memory" in the work of

three contemporary male poets.
Because of the breadth of approaches to the topics of history, mem
ory, and mourning in southern literature, this double issue of SLJ (with
the quantity and quality of submissions, it easily could have been a triple
or even a quadruple issue) has a number of special features from a vari
ety of areas and in diverse forms. Brenda Marie Osbey s haunting poems
set the tone for this volume with their litany of loss, mourning song, and
remembrance of

slave ships in the distance?

centuries longer
nearer
than we care ever to have it said.
("Requiem for a Tall Man")

Osbey s personal reflections on place, history, and writing in her essa

"Writing Home" are grounded in her familial and community influ
ences in her native New Orleans and reveal New Orleans' uniqueness a
an intellectual, cultural, and emotional haven for African American writ
ers, artists, and musicians. As a work of scholarship outside the field of
literary studies but of special consequence to scholars of southern litera
ture, Griffin and Hargis's historical/sociological study in this issue initi
ates a practice the coeditors of SLJ intend to continue by inviting essays
on occasion from established scholars in other disciplines. Robert Jack
son's discussion of the history of lynching films falls outside the trad
tional disciplinary emphasis on literary studies this journal has observed
in the past, but reconnects to literature in its emphasis on Intruder i
the Dust-, and Rebecca Mark's "Mourning Emmett," originally a perfo
mance piece, enacts the passion of mourning and inscribes, rather tha
describes, the necessity of art in the process of articulating the South
history of racial trauma.
In 1988 Eudora Welty, whose widely read story "Where Is the Voice
Coming From?" recounts the murder of Mississippi civil rights leader
Medgar Evers through the consciousness of his assassin, worried that cul
tural memory had disappeared for young Mississippians:
When this museum mounted the first ever exhibition on the civil
rights movement in Jackson, it had marvelous posters, photographs,
everything. School children?black and white?were invited to
come. None of them had ever heard of civil rights. They didn't

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 6 Southern Literaryjournal

know there had ever been a time when there weren't any. They never
heard of Medgar Evers. It was amazing. They passed through this
as if it were a glass wall. (156)

This special issue offers a more general interrogation not only of what
Walter Benn Michaels has called "remembered history" but also and
especially remembered history's gaps and forgettings. One might argue
that Faulkner was wrong: even in southern culture, sometimes the past is
really past, especially when we'd prefer that it be. Cultural memory comes
into being through cultural amnesia. As historian Jacqueline Dowd Hall
has noted, in southern history and especially in the history of the civil
rights movement, "remembrance is always a form of forgetting" (1233).
Such forgetting is necessary to the unifying narratives of strong nation
alisms. Benedict Anderson suggests, "All profound changes in conscious
ness, by their very nature, bring with them their characteristic amnesias.
Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narra
tives" (204). In terms of the civil rights movement, Hall calls for "novel
forms of storytelling" to counter narratives that sustain and manipulate
cultural amnesia (1263); following Hall, Christopher Metress seeks in the
novel Bombington "a harder civil rights movement" that points toward
the ongoing nature of the battle for racial justice. In general, it is south
ern writers' narratives of history, and how they have been constructed
not just from memory but also from forgetting, that interest the scholars
represented in this volume.
While collective memory is shaped by forgetting, it is also haunted
by it. Those transparent walls that Welty spoke of can become visible.
Indeed, the "ghosts" in the stories of southern history uncannily appear
time and time again, whether in "the long song" of old slave songs that
imbue the drowned landscape of New Orleans, or actual wounds that
appear on the body of a girl who inherits her slave ancestors' quilt in
Phyllis Alesia Perry's Stigmata, or postmodern categories of writing about
slavery that question master narratives of history, or a Confederate flag
controversy, or Emmett Till's broken face, or the specter of lynching in
American film, or the mourning for family and community that has
previously been the trademark of southern nostalgia but has now, in the
hands of contemporary poets, become something else altogether. Indeed,
such ghosts can haunt and destroy the psyche of a character like Ran
dall Kenan's Horace Cross, who, as Eva Tettenborn suggests, succumbs
to severe melancholia when caught between his own same-sex desire and
a traditional southern African American community that conditions its
members to despise homosexuality.

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 Reading History, Memory, and Forgetting 7

Within this maze of remembering and forgetting, writing from and

about the American South wanders and hovers, producing and replicat
ing and embodying its own forms of memory and history in stories of
specific people and places and events. As Oliver observes, the possible
future that we imagine, even yearn for, affects how we perceive the sense
of possibility held in the past; and many of these essays, especially those
by Griffin and Hargis, Mark, Salvaggio, Jackson, Metress, Susan V. Don
aldson, and Margaret Bauer, look toward the future as they interrogate
the past, parts of which have gone missing. Donaldson's discussion of
Edward P. Jones' The Known World and Valerie Martin's Property, for
example, shows how these novels of antebellum plantation life, both pub
lished in 2003, revise both the content and form of the historical record
as they raise postmodern questions about how that record has been con
structed through erasure.
In a few years, Griffin and Hargis may want to do another study to
learn who remembers the impact of Hurricane Katrina, this country's
worst domestic disaster in history, on New Orleans and the Mississippi
Gulf Coast. And who has forgotten. The transatlantic history of New
Orleans with its African, French, Spanish, Caribbean foundations has
itself been a site of national amnesia, which the specter of anguish and
mourning in the wake of Katrina has awakened. New Orleans, often
on the periphery of southern literary studies, haunts this special issue.
It haunted the call for papers, which was written soon after the disas
ter; and it makes the study of history, memory, and mourning in our
field both present and prescient, not to speak of utterly political. With
Osbey's writings and Salvaggio's essay bracketing the issue and Mark's
resonant linkage of Emmett Tills murder and the contemporary tragedy
of an African American city, New Orleans hovers over these discussions
like Walter Benjamin's angel of history confronted by catastrophe and
piles of wreckage. Much southern literature, diverse as it is, has under
taken what Brett Kaplan in her 2006 book Unwanted Beauty: Aesthetic
Pleasure in Holocaust Representation has called "aesthetic mourning." In
the context of the Holocaust, Kaplan argues for the ethical possibilities
of aesthetic engagement in the face of impossible and unrelenting horror.
There is an ethical challenge summoned by these aesthetic processes of
mourning that manifests what Shoshana Felman describes as "a perfor
mative engagement between consciousness and history, a struggling act
of readjustment between the integrative scope of words and the uninte
grated impact of events"; this is, Felman says, "an art of urgency" (114).
Such writing?powerful, raw, embodied work that mourns, performs,

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 8 Southern Literaryjournal

and challenges?is now emerging out of the Katrina disaster in local,

university, and trade presses, and in a few years, literary scholars in south
ern studies will be teaching it in classrooms and writing about it.5
In "Mourning Emmett," Mark writes: "If art is mourning, then art
is the most political of all human action." If, as Rossington suggests,
both history and memory can be reconceived in and as textual prac
tice, the lived processes that result in cultural memory and an aesthet
ics that engages and forms those processes are irrevocably linked. At the
spine, then, of this special issue are questions. What are southern stud
ies' ethical and aesthetic responsibilities to actual lived lives, to cultural
memory, to massive historical interventions? What kinds of forms and
structures does an aesthetic attentiveness to history, especially a violent
history, require of a writer or a literary scholar? When and through what
means do art, literature, film, music, and scholarly writing about the
South become not only vehicles for but enactments of cultural mourning
and memorialization? How do mourning and memorialization at once
solidify and destabilize the ideas of nation or region or race? If a literary
text about historical trauma is another way of knowing that event, how
does such a text make complicated ethical claims on the reader through
its aesthetic energies, and what might those claims be? How might cer
tain sites of cultural memory become obscured or forgotten as public his
tory but re-emerge, phantom-like, in art or scholarship?
These aren't new questions, but they are persistent and compelling.
They seem at once peculiar to southern studies and much much larger.
Most of us in the humanities believe that art does cultural work, that
art matters profoundly. Increasingly, questions about how art can mat
ter in a post-Holocaust, post-Hiroshima world enmeshed in nationalism,
capitalism and militarism have become more central. As Toni Morrison
indicates in her many statements about the relationship of art and eth
ics, it is art's rendering of history and memory that is a key to the affec
tive, cognitive, and political processes that form systems of ethics and
justice. The way history comes to matter, in all the nuances of the term,
in art can create, for better or worse, a present and a future that matter
in the real world, a world that includes the American South but moves
far beyond it. The challenge of southern studies lies in its attentiveness
to those horizons.
Minrose G win

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 Reading History, Memory, and Forgetting 9

NOTES

i. See Osbey s All Saints, 37, lines 30-34.

2. "Remembered history" evolves, according to Walter Benn Michaels,
out of the collapse of artificial distinctions between historical event and
personal experience. The site of this collapse is narrative, and Michaels explores
Morrison's Beloved as an American novel which enacts this collapse. See
Michaels' "'You who never was there': Slavery and the New Historicism" in
The Americanization of the Holocaust, ed. Hilene Flanzbaum (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1999): 181-197.
3. Diana Taylor invokes this term {The Archive and the Repertoire 54), as do
Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith in "From Feminism to Cultural Memory,"
in Theories of Memory: A Reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007): 224. As
Hirsch and Smith discuss, the notion of an "act of transfer" comes from Paul
Connerton in How Societies Remember (New York: Cambridge UP, 1989): 89.
4. In this introduction to the "Collective Memory" section of the 2007
collection Theories of Memory, Rossington is alluding to John Frow's essay
"Repetition and Forgetting," which critiques the split between history as
public and memory as private advanced by Pierre Nora in his widely cited essay
"Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de M?moire" in Representations Special
Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory (Spring 1989): 7-24.
5. At the September 2007 Southern Women Writers Conference at Berry
College, for example, New Orleans resident and Louisiana Poet Laureate
Brenda Marie Osbey, whose work begins this issue, read from a new group of
New Orleans poems about Katrina; and Pass Christian, Mississippi native and
novelist Margaret McMullen read from a new short story collection about the
disaster on the Gulf Coast. Their readings, while the most notable, were among
several others on the effects of Katrina. On the local scene, fiction, poetry,
and drama are emerging, including a production of Waiting for Godot set in
the Ninth Ward and volumes such as Life in the Wake: Fiction from
Post-Katrina New Orleans, ed. Joe Longo and Jarret Lofstead. (New Orleans:
NOLAFugees.com, 2007).

WORKS CITED

Anderson, Benedict. "From Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin

and Spread of Nationalism? In Theories of Memory: A Reader. Ed. Michael
Rossington and Anne Whitehead. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007.
242-252.
Caruth, Cathy. "Trauma and Experience: Introduction." In Trauma:
Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
1995. 3-12.
Felman, Shoshana. "Camus' The Plague, or a Monument to Witnessing." In
Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History.
Felman and Dori Laub, M.D. New York: Routledge, 1992. 93-119.

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 lo Southern Literaryjournal

Hall, Jacqueline Dowd. "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political
Uses of the Past." Journal oj American History 91.4. March 2005. 1233-1263.
Irwin-Zarecka, Iwona. Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective
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Kaplan, Brett. Unwanted Beauty: Aesthetic Pleasure in Holocaust Representation.
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