Engaging Museums: Rhetorical Education and Social Justice - Softcover

Obermark, Lauren E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0809338505 ISBN 13: 9780809338504

Verlag: Southern Illinois University Press, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

Examining rhetorical engagement with difficult topics

Museums offer an opportunity to reenvision rhetorical education through their address of hard, discomforting histories that challenge visitors to confront traumatic events and work toward a better future. While both museum studies and rhetoric center the audience in their scholarship and practices, this volume engages across and between these disciplines, allowing for a fuller theorization and enactment of rhetorical education’s connections to social justice. Engaging Museums works to fill gaps between the fields of rhetoric and social justice by going beyond classrooms to sites of public memory represented in museums.
 
This volume presents three distinct, diverse case studies of recently established historical museums taking on the rhetorically complex tasks of representing traumatic events: the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, the National World War I Museum, and the Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum. Through rhetorical and comparative analysis of data collected from the museums and intersectional transdisciplinary frameworks, each chapter theorizes aspects of rhetoric—namely identification, collectivity, and memory—bringing rhetorical theory more firmly into current conversations surrounding civic engagement and social justice. 
 
Obermark’s weave of voices and perspectives concludes with a critical focus on how memory may serve as a generative pedagogical topos for both public rhetoric and university-based rhetoric and writing classrooms. This book helps scholars, students, and teachers bring what museums do—difficult, complicated pedagogical work representing hard history—back inside the classroom and further into our civic discourse.
 

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lauren E. Obermark, associate professor at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, is coeditor of The Rhetoric of Participation: Interrogating Commonplaces in and beyond the Classroom. She has published on rhetoric, pedagogy, social justice, and public memory in Rhetoric Review, College English, and Reflections: A Journal of Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing, and Service Learning.

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Prologue: The Catalyst of Memory

As I finalize this book, acutely aware of the never-ending process of writing, I am struck that just as my work must stop, the ongoing pursuit of social justice, especially as it relates to memory, carries on more powerfully than ever. Drafting these words in early August of 2020, the nation is reeling from the recent losses of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Elijah McClain--to name just a few Black people killed by law enforcement officers in the last several months. The Black Lives Matter movement, first establishing itself in 2013 when Trayvon Martin was killed, is once again front and center in America, on the streets, on social media, and in the hearts and minds of many non-Black people who are experiencing their first racial justice awakening. Casting an even darker shadow over anti-Black police violence is the COVID-19 pandemic, which disproportionately affects the health and livelihood of Black Americans, reminding us (as if we needed another reminder?) of the systemic nature of racism. Some have already noted that we are living in a time of a “dual pandemic,” a “twin pandemic,” or a pandemic within a pandemic, underscoring racism itself asa public health crisis. The effects of COVID-19 and police violence, then, are not separate issues, but instead they are deeply intertwined, emanating from systems rooted in white supremacy and designed to oppress Black people (Bion; A. Jones; Kendi).

The deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Elijah McClain are individual tragedies, unique in circumstance and person. But they are united as senseless injustices made possible by systemic racism. As a result, these deaths are especially complex in that they are private and public. Each person is mourned privately and individually by families and friends, as well as publicly and collectively by activists, politicians, and even your seemingly least woke white family member or friend, who you never expected would catch on to the movement. In other words, the memory of those lost to state-sanctioned anti-Black violence--recently, long ago, and undoubtedly in the future--illustrate memory as a powerful catalyst for engaging social justice and creating change. 

This catalyst of memory is at the heart of this book, with history museums serving as challenging spaces where visitors learn how to do the rhetorical work, in word and action, internally and externally, of engaging for social justice. It is notable too, that during this fraught twin pandemic summer, some of the most wide-spread and resistant rhetorical actions involve confronting, discussing, and often removing monuments and memorials that perpetuate racist public memory. The removal of confederate monuments in the United States has been an ongoing conversation and movement for many years, but this summer has widened the scope significantly to more regularly include other canonized but troubling historical figures like Christopher Columbus and the founding fathers. A common refrain from people who want to maintain such monuments, even when the monuments are recently established and causing deep pain for many who encounter them, goes like this: to topple a monument or change a name on a building will “destroy” or “erase” history. While there are countless ways to critique that refrain (and many writers have done so in popular and academic publications), what I hope this book can further bring to light is that these painful parts of American history­­ are far from “destroyed” or “erased” when a monument falls or is removed. At modern museums, what is known as “hard history,” such as that of slavery and its concomitant brutality, is front and center. While monuments are usually stagnant and imply a celebration or canonization, history museums are nuanced, complex, interactive places of memory; they demand visitors not only learn about hard, racist history, but they also introduce modes and moments for them to reflect on it, question how they have been taught it before, and grapple with its ongoing implications. In short, museums engage visitors, andvisitors in turn learn to better engage history, public memory, and one another.

One last catalyst of memory, before I admit that I really do have to stop writing this book. On July 17, 2020, congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis died. Shortly before his death, he composed a powerful piece that he requested be published on the day of his funeral, which took place on July 30. The editorial was first released in the New York Times, though it immediately circulated widely across the internet. In this essay, Lewis invokes his own memory, along with those of many other Black folks, to call for continued action. First, Lewis demonstrates his ongoing commitment to the pursuit of justice, even in the throes of pancreatic cancer and in the final days of his life: “That is why I had to visit Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, though I was admitted to the hospital the following day. I just had to see and feel it for myself that, after many years of silent witness, the truth is still marching on.” He then connects going to this symbolic space of action directly to the memory of lives lost to anti-Black violence, drawing a painful throughline from the lynching of Emmett Till to more recent killings at the hand of the state: “Emmett Till was my George Floyd. He was my Rayshard Brooks, Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor. He was 14 when he was killed, and I was only 15 years old at the time. I will never ever forget the moment when it became so clear that he could easily have been me.” Finally, he concludes his essay by invoking his own memory, making a call to continue to catalyze memory for action: “Though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe.” Lewis reminds us that the work of anti-racism is never done. Even more, when we engage memory, deeply, and in all its messiness, we can continue to use and teach rhetoric in the pursuit of social justice. 

1. Rhetorical Education and Why Museums Matter: Entanglements of Rhetorical Education, Public Memory, and Social Justice

In the spring of 2019, I was teaching a class called “Rhetoric and Social Justice,” which serves as both a broad introduction to rhetorical history and theory but through the lens of rhetoric’s connection to civic engagement and social justice. The first assigned “text” for the class was a visit to the St. Louis Art Museum (SLAM) to view an exhibit that was leaving only a week after our semester started: Kehinde Wiley: Saint Louis. Wiley, most well-known for his 2018  portrait President Barack Obama, has long created art that offers political commentary about race. As SLAM describes his oeuvre in their exhibition summary, “His works address the politics of race and power in art, drawing attention to the pervasive lack of representation of people of color in the art world” (“Kehinde Wiley: Saint Louis”). Not surprisingly, then, Wiley’s Saint Louis was locally focused in terms of the portraiture subjects, but the commentary resonated nationwide. Through Wiley’s process of “street casting”--approaching strangers on the street and asking them to pose for portraits--Saint Louis featured African Americans from Ferguson and adjacent locations. Each of the eleven St. Louis portraits he painted took as their starting place, and often their title, works of art from SLAM’s impressive historical collection. The proud poses and gazes of Wiley’s Black subjects, sometimes...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Southern Illinois University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0809338505
• ISBN 13: 9780809338504
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 178
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland