Lifting the Shadow

Reshaping Memory, Race, and Slavery in U.S. Museums

By Amy Sodaro

SERIES: Genocide, Political Violence, Human Rights

Rutgers University Press

Lifting the Shadow: Reshaping Memory, Race, and Slavery in U.S. Museums examines a small but significant wave of new U.S. memorial museums that focus on slavery and its ongoing violent legacies, including the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Montgomery’s Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration and Greenwood Rising, which commemorates the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. These museums are challenging historical narratives of slavery and race by placing racial oppression at the center of American history and linking historical slavery to contemporary racial injustice, but they have opened in a period marked by growing racial tension, white nationalism and political division. Sodaro examines how the violence of U.S. slavery and its lasting legacies is negotiated in these museums, as well as their potential to contribute to the development of a more critical historical memory of race in the U.S. at this particularly volatile sociopolitical moment.

Lifting the Shadow is a path-breaking work, and provides readers with eye-opening analyses of how four relatively recent U.S. memorial museums rethink and represent the complicated, violent, and often ignored history and repercussions of U.S. slavery and racism. This well-timed volume will be a valuable asset in the classroom for specialists as well as a public audience interested in issues of race, history, and representation. Joyce Apsel, president of the Institute for the Study of Genocide

How is the United States grappling with its difficult pasts and engaging with histories that make us uncomfortable? Lifting the Shadow examines the extraordinary memory museums that have been built in the early twenty-first century, museums that demand of the nation a reckoning with the difficult pasts of slavery and racism, museums that shape historical engagement in ways that would not have been possible before. Amy Sodaro shows us that despite the polarization and political retrenchment of our times, these museums point with hope toward new ways of living with difficult pasts and being in America. Marita Sturken, author of Terrorism in American Memory: Memorials, Museums, and Architecture in the Post-9/11 Era

Amy Sodaro’s accessibly-written, thoughtful, and timely comparative study of three pivotal U.S. museums shows that they manage to link historical slavery with contemporary racial injustice to varying degrees. Most importantly, she argues that memorial museums have a responsibility in democratic societies, to not only point out and situate oppression in the historical past, but highlight its ongoing structural embeddedness in our present. Silke Arnold-de Simine, author of Mediating Memory in the Museum: Empathy, Trauma, Nostalgia

Amy Sodaro is associate professor of sociology at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. She is the author of Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence (RUP, 2018) and co-editor of Museums and Sites of Persuasion: Politics, Memory and Human Rights and Museums and Mass Violence: Perils and Potential.

Introduction
1          Race and Memory in the US: A Shifting Memorial Landscape
2          Telling “America’s Story”: National Museum of African American History and Culture
3          “Shining the light of truth”: The Legacy Museum
4          “After a century of silence”: Greenwood Rising Historical Center
5          America’s New Memorial Museums
6          Conclusion: Memory’s Present and Future
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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