| Sumario: | Charlottesville’s “Unite the Right” demonstration rallied against the campaign to remove Confederate monuments, triggered by the 2015 murders at Charleston’s Mother Emanuel AME Church by a White supremacist intent on instigating a race war. This article addresses the Confederate monument controversy and the consequent American cultural divide by using anamnestic and anagnoretic approaches to historical memory. 778 Confederate monuments appeared in the United States post-1865, the vast majority of which were built during the Jim Crow era (1877-1954). As an incarnation of selective amnesia, these monuments masqueraded as a benign remembrance of southern patriotism. Yet, below the surface lay a history of deep-seated hostility, from slavery to lynching. A Ricoeurian theory of anamnesis suggests that Confederate monuments, representative of forgetting, must be met by an empathetic recollection of what is absent, lest the legacy of African American suffering be effaced. However, this article argues that anamnesis alone is not enough; instead, anamnesis must be transfigured by an Aristotelian anagnorisis in which the meaning of Black suffering is recast into a redemptive moment for the American body politic. The article applies René Girard’s theory on mimetic rivalry and the scapegoat to provide insight into the underlying dynamics of the Confederate monuments controversy.
|
|---|