Lapses in memory: slavery memorials and historical amnesia in the United States

UnrestrictedThe monuments and memorials scattered across a nation 's landscape create permanent records of place and time. These permanent records particularize history and memory. The atrocities of war, genocide, apartheid and slavery form a historical category of cultural trauma that exists as part of a country 's individual and collective narratives, subsequently complicating memory and memorialization. This thesis locates slavery memorials as a typology of public commemoration. In doing so, it highlights the historical amnesia facilitated by a lack of official commissions representative of the trauma of slavery in the United States. This analysis also explores the existing scholarship on nationhood, cultural trauma, memory, and identifies potential strategies for reconciling a nation 's traumatic past vis-à-vis public commemorations. Finally, this research examines the public art genre of monuments and memorials as a coping mechanism for traumatized communities