Lifting the Shadow: Reshaping Memory, Race, and Slavery in U.S. Museums (Genocide, Political Violence, Human Rights)

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.
 

AMY SODARO is an 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 (Rutgers University Press 2018) and coeditor of Museums and Sites of Persuasion: Politics, Memory and Human Rights and Museums and Mass Violence: Perils and Potential.