Countermemory

A Rhetoric of Resistance

By April L. O'Brien and James Chase Sanchez

SERIES: Rhetoric, Culture, and Social Critique

University of Alabama Press

Investigates the interdisciplinary dimensions of countermemory through a rhetorical lens

Countermemory: A Rhetoric of Resistance by April L. O’Brien and James Chase Sanchez is a groundbreaking monograph that explores the concept of countermemory from an interdisciplinary and rhetorical perspective. The authors define “countermemory” as remembrance that resituates often overlooked or erased narratives of marginalized groups by positioning these memories as equally significant to dominant historical narratives. This work investigates how countermemories emerge in response to public memories, highlighting the tensions and resistance that arise when marginalized voices challenge mainstream historical accounts.

Through a mixed-methodological approach—incorporating site-based analysis, participant observation, textual analysis, and historiography—O’Brien and Sanchez examine countermemory in both physical and digital spaces. From memorial sites and museums to music videos, TV shows, and digital maps, they reveal the various ways countermemory operates and persists. The authors focus particularly on countermemory in the American South, centering on the experiences and histories of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities.

Countermemory is essential reading for scholars and students of rhetoric and public memory. The book also offers rich insights to readers who are passionate about addressing issues of racial inequality, people interested in examining their own experiences and the role they can play in promoting social change, and those interested in exploring the ways in which history is constructed and presented, and how marginalized perspectives are often excluded or distorted.

Reviews

Countermemory is an insightful and provocative intervention into the study of rhetoric and public memory. The concept of liberatory countermemory promises to open important new avenues for thinking about the ways communities resist and transform practices of remembrance.' —Kendall R. Phillips, editor of Framing Public Memory

There is a lot about [Countermemory] to like . . . the writing is engaging and the project itself is important.' —Mary Stuckey is author, editor, or coeditor of twelve books, including Deplorable: The Worst Presidential Campaigns from Jefferson to Trump

Countermemory is a book about memory (and other) practices that privilege BIPOC resistances to dominant memory structures. We need work like this. . . . Much work in memory, memorialization, and rhetoric has focused on dominant memorialization . . . attending at length and with care to resistive memory sites and practices is very important and is well executed.' —Greg Dickinson, coauthor of The Haunted West: Memory and Commemoration at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West