Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Coming to Terms with Memory
- 1 The Tragedy of Memory: Antigone, Memory, and the Politics of Possibility
- 2 Remembering to Forget: Democratizing Memory, Nietzschean Forgetting, and South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission
- 3 Introducing Segregated Memory and Segregated Democracy in America
- 4 Remembering What Others Cannot Be Expected to Forget: James Baldwin and Segregated Memory
- 5 Making Silence Speak: Toni Morrison and the Beloved Community of Memory
- 6 In Memory of Democratic Time: Specters of Mexico's Past and Democracy's Future
- 7 The Future of the Past: Unholy Ghosts and Redemptive Possibilities
- 8 Imprisoned by the Past: The Complexion of Mass Incarceration
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
4 - Remembering What Others Cannot Be Expected to Forget: James Baldwin and Segregated Memory
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Coming to Terms with Memory
- 1 The Tragedy of Memory: Antigone, Memory, and the Politics of Possibility
- 2 Remembering to Forget: Democratizing Memory, Nietzschean Forgetting, and South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission
- 3 Introducing Segregated Memory and Segregated Democracy in America
- 4 Remembering What Others Cannot Be Expected to Forget: James Baldwin and Segregated Memory
- 5 Making Silence Speak: Toni Morrison and the Beloved Community of Memory
- 6 In Memory of Democratic Time: Specters of Mexico's Past and Democracy's Future
- 7 The Future of the Past: Unholy Ghosts and Redemptive Possibilities
- 8 Imprisoned by the Past: The Complexion of Mass Incarceration
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Men are so constituted that they derive their conviction of their own possibilities largely from the estimate formed of them by others. If nothing is expected of a people, that people will find it difficult to contradict that expectation.
—Frederick DouglassWe have an obligation to remember what our fellow citizens cannot be expected to forget.
—Pablo De GrieffIn Confederates in the Attic, Tony Horwitz offers a disturbing observation: “When Spike Lee's movie on Malcolm X launched a wave of ‘X’ clothing, a counter symbol quickly sprouted on T-shirts and bumper stickers across the white South. It showed the diagonal cross of the rebel flag beside the words ‘You Wear Your X, I'll Wear Mine.’” The distance between the two X's suggests an enduring racial divide between opposing relationships to the past. Malcolm X spoke to this correspondence in 1964 when he declared: “We didn't land on Plymouth Rock. Plymouth Rock landed on us.” In this chapter I make the case for James Baldwin as a thinker who disabuses readers of willful innocence about the complex legacy of segregated memory in America. I explore how present publics inherit the challenges of desegregating memory that Baldwin identified. I then assess the extent to which his contributions will help those seeking to address the threat segregated memory poses to trans-racial democratization.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Power of Memory in Democratic Politics , pp. 65 - 82Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013