The working title of my dissertation project is: “Memory Set in Stone? How public memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Junior is negotiated in the digital age”
Let’s take this apart.
Public memory, a socio-political construct, is an identity-building device that nations use to define who “their people” are, and what it means to be a good citizen. It mainly consists of a selection of events and figures from the past who are chosen by people in power to communicate a nation’s ideals and paths for the future. Public memory is a communicative process and the stories chosen to be re-told can be imbued in history books, folk songs, national holidays, statues, rituals, or museums. It is all about which aspects of a nation's past are highlighted by the people in power and largely accepted as representative of the country as a whole. Public memory is therefore no objective retelling of "history" but a hegemonic grand narrative.
I look at the phenomenon of public memory in the context of the United States. There are many reasons for this, one being that I have a Master’s degree in English, where I specialized on literary negotiations of placeleness of the African American community in New York City after the Harlem Renaissance. This means I have long been interested in -- and researched -- the question of belonging, particularly how it is impacted through representations in physical space.
Another reason why I wanted to study public memory in the context of the U.S is that it is a fairly new nation which had (and still has) a very particular way of explicitly using language to define its “borders.” The US is a nation created through myth and one where the conversation about who is a true American is still strongly present to this day. That is not to say that this is not also true in other countries, but the U.S. does pose a special case. I therefore chose to study my phenomenon in a context where it is explicitly assigned tremendous value.
Now, how to study public memory if it is in itself an inherently immaterial process? I decided to study its expression through memorials because they are one of the most visible and permanent representations of public memory. I started this project before the public discussions surrounding or the tearing down of problematic memorials. However, this development further showed that memorials are by no means irrelevant old artefacts that no longer have any meaning in our digital age.
Memorials are the most visible marker of public memory: they are monuments in the public realm which not just remind individuals of events and figures past but also honor them. Memorials are therefore very explicit statements of appreciation by a nation to the people whom it deems important. Now, if we want a more inclusive memorial landscape, we have to know two things:
1. How are memorials to members of marginalized groups experienced by visitors?
2. Are there alternative or additional ways of commemoration in an age where the internet provides so many possibilities for more flexible and accessible narratives?
Public memory in the U.S. is filled with white men. Contributions by members of marginalized communities hardly make it into the nation’s public memory. Just think of all the statues sprinkled across the nation and how many of them are not of white men (not many). In addition to the memorial landscape therefore not being inclusive, it is also not representative: White men were not the only individuals who helped build the U.S. (sometimes quite literally) and have contributed to its ongoing "success story" in many aspects of its society.
Wanting to study how the few members of marginalized groups are honored, in order to find out how these types of memorials can be successful,
I wanted to study DC memorials because the nation’s capital was explicitly built to stand for the nation as a whole. It is named the District of Columbia after “Columbia,” the toponym referring to and female personificiation representing the 13 colonies. Those who are honored in DC are thus representative for the nation as a whole. This is particularly true of the National Mall. This is the capital’s prime location for memorials. A huge stretch of land, flanked by the Lincoln Memorial in the West, the White House in the North, and the Capitol in the East. Along this national mall, only one member of any marginalized community is honored. And that individual is MLK.
MLK is an interesting figure to study for more reasons than that he is the only one honored here: He is one of the very few members of the Civil Rights Movement who is commemorated at all. This selection is not random and exposes much about the intentions behind his memorialization. At his stand-alone memorial in DC, there is no information about his life, no mention of the fact that he was considered an enemy of the country (and assassinated!), or information about other members of the movement or struggles they faced. He is framed as one brave man who, through peaceful resistance, made the country better.
So, these are my questions in a nutshell. How do I go about answering them?
I visit the MLK memorial and I also go to the second memorial honoring him, a small inscription to his 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial (where he held that speech) to answer my first main research question: What are visitors actually experiencing when at the sites? I observe what visitors do there and I talk to them and join guided tours. I ask visitors and locals about what it means to be there in person, what they have been doing since they got there, what they wish could be different, if they had any expectations coming here and what in the heck they are doing with their cellphones the whole time.
This ties into the second question, about the potentials of the internet. This is particularly interesting in the memorialization of Dr.King because in his case, even more so than is true for other figures from the past, history is re-told in extremely simplified manners and might profit from additions from individual citizens. Now, there is research out there showing that such grand narratives can be challenged by adding petit récits, smaller narratives to it: if there are enough people who speak up against the dominant narrative, it can be changed. This could mean that the memorials themselves might be changed or that by adding more information to them online, the memorial landscape is being changed without any changes to the physical site. Because, remember: Public memory is more than the statues!
In order to study online interactions with the dominant narrative told by the memorials, I look at individual contributions online. Because this project is limited in time and other resources (mainly me being the only investigator), I had to pick one platform on which to study visitor interactions. Because DC is not just a place that people visit to debate retellings of history through memorial sites, but also to be tourists in their capital city, the platform I study is Instagram. There are other reasons too, such as the fact that I am interested in visual communication and Instagram is the prime location for that. To study this aspect, I conduct a digital ethnography, which includes analyzing how people interact with the memorials using the memorials' location tags and thereby interacting with the official narrative communicated by the memorial. I study their images and their captions, and I interview them (through Instagram) about their experiences on site and motivations for posting.
Lastly, in order to paint a fuller picture of the current state of memorial sites in the nation's capitol as well as conversations about how to improve them, and what role digital tools might play in the future, I interview experts, such as members of the National Planning Commission.
In the end, I combine all of those different insights into a book that explains what role physical memorials to Dr. King in DC play today, how the internet is and potentially can be used to make his memorialization more accessible and exhaustive and, above all, how individuals are experiencing these processes of commemoration and partaking in them.
