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作者

Daves Rossell

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JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY,Vol.48,Issue1,P.

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英文

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作者单位

摘要

Commemoration touches everyone. One generation passes to another, and inevitably, some honor is celebrated and some loss is suffered. Life’s cycle and its key moments in family or community garner recognition in a name, an event, or a marker. Inevitably, even what can seem like a relatively simple act bundles within it layers of history and interpretation. Ultimately, what remains begs explanation and analysis. No one needs to be told that this is a topic of tremendous historical currency. Monuments are going up and monuments are coming down. In such a maelstrom, the entire process and meaning of commemoration is now being reconsidered. Andrea E. Frohne, Dell Upton, and James E. Young provide a remarkable set of recent studies showing a range of commemorative acts, the varied contexts in which such commemoration was done, and the diverse reactions. Andrea A. Frohne is the most documentary. Drawing on her expertise in African art history, she brings formidable breadth and depth to The African Burial Ground in New York City. It is an amazing story. Environmental impact research done between 1988 and 1991 in preparation for the federal government to purchase property for a federal office building uncovered what was ultimately estimated to have been a nearly seven-acre site in lower Manhattan serving as the place of burial for as many as fifteen to twenty thousand men, women, and children of African descent. Burials dated from at least 1712 to 1795, making this the earliest and largest known cemetery for African people in North America. As substantial as the numbers make it sound, this site proved tantalizingly elusive with only broad historical outlines framing scant historical records. Even as an archeological site, only a small portion was accessible and even that was compromised by disturbance. Amazingly, the behemoth U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), trying to barrel ahead with construction of the new federal building, met its match in legions of intensely engaged individuals that formed local, national, and international coalitions to slow construction and learn from the site. Ultimately, the thirty-four-story federal office building now stands, but it is suffused with commemorative works inside and surrounding it. What was for a decade a site surrounded by a locked fence is now designated a national monument articulating the diverse expression responding to the powerful presence of the cemetery. Frohne’s narrative charts an ambitious course that includes both meticulously recounting African and African American life in colonial New York, with what evidence she has, and carefully documenting its ever-changing context in modern times in an unusually personal and inclusive manner. As Frohne tells it, this discovery uncovered not just a lost cemetery but a distinct opportunity to appreciate a people; her subtitle states it—their Memory, Spirituality, and Space. Fully acknowledging the challenging nature of the evidence, and attempting to use the lack of evidence to her advantage, Frohne states, “I explore the visuality of the African Burial Ground by considering how it was initially forgotten and obliterated and then eventually manifested, engaged, and remembered” (6). While not as clearly expressed as it might be, the structure of the book follows this sequence, from exploring an absence of recognition, to acknowledgment amidst immanent destruction, to the specificity of archeological excavations, the political groundswell, and finally the artistic flowering. The complete chronology extended from December 1982 to 2010. While the lack of historical records speaks to a legacy of African American marginalization, Frohne suggests some sense of identity through archeology. Actual excavation of 419 graves in the early 1990s yielded evidence of artifacts and of skeletal remains that were richly evocative of the time and place. One early burial featured an older woman showing a variety of signs of status in an African context buried with her head to the west, wrapped in a shroud with a string of glass beads and cowrie shells around her waist, and a bracelet of alternating turquoise and pale yellow glass beads. Her front teeth were filed to hourglass or peg shapes, and an unused clay pipe sat beneath her pelvis. One of only a few graves excavated that displayed so many connections to African burial practices, the woman’s bones revealed much more commonly seen “biomechanical stress” on her shoulders and arms from overwork, and evidence of osteoarthritis and anemia (Frohne, 139-140, 155). Such careful analysis of individual details, however, does not provide Frohne any specific identity or origin of the dead. Rather she states, Even though the African Burial Ground had a large population brought directly from Africa, very little can be attributed to a specific cultural group or geographical place within Africa. Instead we find similar traditions practiced by different groups of peoples across Africa, such as the use of pipes, rings, and beads; as well as across the diaspora, with the burial of buttons, shells, quartz, and disks. (Frohne, 146-147) Faced with such little uniformity of origin in DNA or clarity in documentary research of slave trading by the Dutch or English, Frohne concludes, Some Africans came as far away as Madagascar, while many others were brought through the Caribbean including Curaçao, Barbadoes, and Antigua from their departure points along the Gold Coast of West Africa and the Congo and Angola of Central Africa. (172-173) The excavation prompted dramatic public involvement that further influenced the meaning given to the site. Frohne carefully charts actions of the GSA, the government organization that oversees federal facilities, and reactions of local grassroots groups, civic organizations, and federal government officials. What began with mistrust of the government’s transparency, and clearly documented accidents where graves suffered damage, led to increased public participation. Getting the attention of U.S. Representative Gus Savage (Dem. Illinois) who chaired the congressional committee overseeing the GSA ensured African American leadership in scientific study of the remains, and “suitable” memorialization and reburial of the remains on the site. Frohne notes how a “complicated melding of politics and spirituality actually [became] a means of constituting the African Burial Ground” (174). After years of “hearings, vigils, protests, demonstrations, and interpersonal discussions,” the actual ceremony of reburial in 2003 spanned two days and involved international participation culminating in an all-night vigil (Frohne, 205, 221-227). The 419 wooden coffins crafted in Ghana featured a heart-shaped design inspired by one found (or assumed to be found as its appearance was indistinct) in burial 101. Taken to be a “sankofa,” or ideogram from the Akan people of Ghana, it appeared like a heart, but represented a bird preening its feathers, expressing the proverb from Ghana, “Go back to the past to inform the present” (Frohne, 143-147). One participant in the ceremony gave each of the deceased a Swahili name. Frohne’s dense reporting suggests that the commemorative acts took on a life of their own and seemed to overshadow the commemorated. Commemorative artworks ranged from those initiated by the public, commissioned by the government, or private offerings. Over time, the artwork effected a substantial transformation of the site into a national and international center of an emergent pan-African spirituality. Broad categories represented “African spirit worlds” and the “African Burial Ground a space of spirituality” (Frohne, 229). Two chapters addressing art distinguish that commissioned in 1993 through the “standard Art-in-Architecture building requirement” or that commissioned in 1995 “by special congressional funding” (Frohne, 228). One example of the detail that Frohne brings to these aspects is her treatment of the New Ring Shout installed in 1994 as a forty-foot circular terrazzo floor design in the new federal office building’s lobby that merits more than ten pages of text, two tables, a color plate and a figure, and extensive quotes from the artwork reproduced verbatim. Frohne tries to encapsulate it, saying, “Multiple spiritual systems interlace through and among each other to become a polydimensional mapping of cosmological flows and transspiritual space between Africa, its diasporas, and Western Europe” (249). Many artworks followed. Frohne dutifully includes them all and organizes her narrative of the commissions chronologically, causing some repetition of what art was “Afrocentric pan-Africanism” and which was “pan-Africanism,” a distinction Frohne makes to emphasize relative specificity of African influence (276-279). As Frohne tells it, this is not just any cemetery but a challenged space of transcendent cultural reparation enlivened by the activism of memory—personal, collective, invented, and even the memory of ideas stored in the soul, what Frohne refers to as anamesia (280-282). So many ironies follow this cemetery’s narration. What was at first a nearly invisible site without recognition became noticed at the very time plats were drawn marking its destruction. Remains excavated from the burial ground but stored at the World Trade Center were destroyed in the 9/11 attack. Loss compounded loss. But it is equally ironic and amazing as well that a site that was so forgotten and lost would be rediscovered and investigated to such dramatic effect. Ultimately, a site with “no visual data . . . about the cemetery’s appearance, boundaries, or names of the deceased” served perfectly for artworks to “become central to recognizing the site” (Frohne, 228-229). Frohne’s book itself is the ultimate compendium further reifying the site and its meanings. But what can at times seem to be a tour-de-force of creative richness can also be an often repetitive and ultimately confusing compilation of every fact and detail associated with the discovery, recognition, excavation, and commemorative act, or lack thereof, related to the African Burial Ground. The book smacks more of a dissertation, which did indeed precede it, or even the many historical and archeological reports prepared as recordation. While Frohne’s encyclopedic effort at inclusiveness can seem over rich, her treatment clearly exposes a central challenge common to modern commemoration: letting different voices speak. Both Upton and Young specifically engage this issue, each asking the fundamental question of how people express what they desire, given the particular medium, time, and place. James E. Young, in his The Stages of Memory, states that he tries “to show what monuments do by what they cannot do” (Young, 14). Beyond a time when “absolute faith” allowed for “common ideals and values that bound them together,” Young believes that a successful commemoration must “enlarge its life and texture to include its genesis in historical time, the activity that brings a monument into being, the debates surrounding the origins, its production, its reception, its life in the mind.” Borrowing Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin’s term “heteroglossia,” Young states “the monument succeeds only insofar as it allows itself full expression of the debates, arguments, and tensions generated in the noisy give and take among competing constituencies driving its very creation” (16). Young’s professional employment and his public service are central to this theme. While he is professor of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, he is also director of the Institute of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. Young’s seven essays and an introduction are largely drawn from his prolific writing that includes four books and dozens of essays, articles, and reviews published in diverse scholarly settings. This volume provides a convenient overview of his scholarship and a broad introduction to his active role as juror and advisor in memorials as prominent as Berlin’s Denkmal (Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe), the 9/11 memorial, and the Utøya, Norway, July 22 memorial. As Young explains it, this emphasis on personal emotional release corresponds to a sea change of memorial art begun with Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a seminal work Young associates with capturing the quality of “loss without redemption. . .a negative space to be filled by those who came to remember within its embrace” (3, 4). This inspired artists to reconceive commemoration of the Holocaust, where the extent of pain and suffering and loss made redemption unthinkable. To acknowledge the widespread creative exploration of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Young coined the term “Holocaust Memorial vernaculars” for a variety of works addressing “loss, absence, and regeneration” (2). Another of Young’s terms is “counter-memorial” or “countermonument” to characterize these nonredemptory works (155-160). Young’s title, Stages of Memory, is meant in part to address the many efforts of memory artists between 1991 and 2014 in creating commemorative memorials, architecture, and art ranging from installations to comic strips to video installations. These are not stages to some ultimate creation, but rather a testament to the diversity of artists addressing memory. Daniel Libeskind’s string of Jewish museums in Berlin and Osnabrück, Germany, as well as Copenhagen, and San Francisco provides the opportunity for Young to ask what Jewish architecture is. While praising its variety (despite all being by Libeskind), he notes it is less about the architecture in itself than being a place to contemplate “the Jewish relationship to God, life, history, culture, and identity” (Young, 105). Gender is considered through a cautionary reading of photographs and literature that depicted Jewish women in ways that Young worries shows them as “idealized icons of victimization, innocence, or even resistance” and not what the women might say about themselves. Even Anne Frank’s diary revealed her father’s judgmental editing. Artistic expression on memory is treated in a long chapter with sections on sculpture, installation art, sequential art, video, and multimedia collage. The diversity and creativity is dazzling, and while the individual artists are not well known, Young’s bringing them together in this essay showcases their resonant power. One work titled “Monument Against Fascism” was a pillar covered in lead on which an inscription asked viewers to add their names to the work as a commitment to staying vigilant. The pillar purposely descended over time completely out of sight, leaving one with a message on the importance of individual commitment. Young commented how this counter-monument flouted memorial conventions: not to console but to provoke; not to remain fixed but to change; not to be everlasting but to disappear; not to be ignored by its passersby but to demand interaction; not to remain pristine but to invite its own violation; not to accept graciously the burden of memory but to throw it back at the town’s feet. (160) The point of the diverse work is precisely its diversity, and the expression of the healthy continuing search for understanding of the holocaust. The search for new perspectives and reappraisal is also Young’s goal in his essay “The Terrible Beauty of Nazi Aesthetics,” one of two essays explicitly addressing Nazi imagery. Stating the hated fascist aesthetics were “monolithic forms that imposed singular meaning on disparate deeds, experiences, and lives” (134), Young reminded the reader that “the didactic logic of monuments . . . turn people into passive spectators” (135). His essay on the uses of Nazi imagery in contemporary Jewish art is sensitive to its controversial use but ultimately argues the value and even the need of such usage to emphasize that there were no “‘final solutions’ to the dilemmas its memory posed for contemporary artists; there can only be more questions” (Young, 151). Different generations need to register their way of knowing about the event, and it would be impossible to consider denying them that right. And this is the great theme of the book: meaning is only alive when it is individually activated, and each circumstance is different. Young positions his own contributions to these developments as bookends, with a chapter on 9/11 opening the volume, and one on Utøya, Norway closing it, both commemorations in which Young contributed to the process. The personal engagement is central to Young’s project in more ways than one. Although modestly referring to himself as an “academic bystander,” he also prominently acknowledged being asked “to help revive memorial processes in Boston, Berlin, and Buenos Aires” (6). For 9/11, he was one of only thirteen jurors (including Maya Lin) who were given the task of choosing between “5201 official submissions from 63 nations, and from 49 American states” (Young, 1). His acceptance into an international commemorative elite is a notable achievement. Young further demonstrates that his commitment is not just to narrate and theorize but also to do. For the Norway memorial, he recalled sketching “in a fever of freehand drawing and free association . . . on large sheets of butcher paper” (Young, 206). As part of the New England Holocaust Memorial Committee, he argued to “let the memorial’s ‘memory-work’ begin with the committee’s own heated discussions, public symposia and community education” (Young, 7). Regarding Germany’s failed competition in 1995 for a memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe, he stated, “the debate itself—perpetually unresolved amid ever-changing conditions—might now be enshrined” (Young, 7). At the site of 9/11, “I argued strenuously,” he noted regarding the absolute necessity for “both remembrance and reconstruction” at the site of 9/11 (Young, 28). But the pains Young takes as a memory artist himself, not least in writing this volume, serves to demonstrate his feeling about the importance of active consolation for all who suffer, reminiscent of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages of loss. Ultimately, his title’s stages of memory are the lessons of the benefits of remembering. In discussing the 9/11 memorial, he stated, “I believed from the outset that it might help first to articulate the stages of the memorial process itself—as a guide to where we’ve been, where we are, and where we would like to go” (Young, 28). He stated, “memory is, after all, a process and will be everlasting only when it remains a process and not a finished result” (Young, 30). The planning stage, the jury stage, the judging stage, the final deliberations stage, and the building stage are all treated in major sections of his chapter and this was only the official process. “Spontaneous commemoration of loss and grief” (Young, 21) was the first stage, and all along “highly public squabbles among agencies, developers, architects, and family member groups continued unabated” (Young, 69). In commenting on Norway, he said, “perhaps never before had a national memorial process been so open to the experiences of others, and perhaps never before had such a process built into itself the capacity for self-analysis and self-correction as it went forward” (Young, 192). Notably, the commemoration sites he advised did incorporate a museum or information center to fulfill the need for an actual place to store the history of the process. Ultimately, Young’s series of essays chart a remarkable testament to the need for acknowledgment in mourning. As he stated just before being asked to be on the committee for the Denkmal, “Better a thousand years of Holocaust memorial competitions in Germany than a final solution to your Holocaust memorial question” (Young, 7). Such an insistence on engaging process explored how to allow expression and not forstall it, how to listen, react, and continue listening, how to be sorrowful and strong. But what of the actual, or ordinary monument? As Young reminds us, no less a scholar than Siegfried Giedion stated that the “demand for monumentality cannot, in the long run, be suppressed” (Young, 13,221: a rare typo referred to him as Sigmund Giedion in the text and in the bibliography). Young concludes his introduction stating that he sees “a shift away from the notion of a national ‘collective memory’ to what [he] would call a nation’s ‘collected memory’” (15). It would seem to follow that if collected in the manner he alludes to, then works of a truly diverse range would need to be included. But Young’s purview follows Maya Lin’s philosophy that he sees as an “implicit critique of the conventional monument’s static fixedness, bombast, self-certainty, and authoritarian didacticism” (6). Ordinary simply will not do as it is a message not worth deciphering. Such a dividing line is a perfect opening for Dell Upton’s What Can and Can’t be Said (full disclosure: Dell Upton advised my doctoral work at the University of California at Berkeley). Upton’s study argues that far from being limited in expression, such ordinary monuments, even those modeled on gravestones, are part of a broad “democratization of monument building” and are actually rich and evocative and engaged in a dramatic struggle in public space (Upton, 15). Upton focusses on the civil rights commemorative monuments found throughout the southern states in small cities and large that he asserts are part of a “struggle to define the civil rights movement’s legacy” (2), also referred to as “the black liberation struggle” (10). He states, “Remember that these monuments celebrate a social movement in which dramatic incidents . . . were anomalies.” He goes on “the freedom struggle was a social movement carried out through mundane, repetitive, distinctly nonphotogenic (however emotionally fraught and often dangerous) activities such as voter registration, school teaching, and the refusal to observe the everyday protocols of segregation” (Upton, 10-11). Upton notes that the time range of such activities was longer than just the archetypal civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s. Furthermore, women were as active as men, and Upton states that such actions “may be the closest the United States has ever come to a truly democratic movement” (11), hence the gravity of these monuments. What for whites have been commonplace everyday activities have for blacks required revolutionary change. Recent Black Lives Matter protests reiterate what should be obvious, but is still clearly a challenge. Upton thus joins the legion of scholars of African American history who have exposed this topic’s dramatic resonance. Just one, the biographer of Frederick Douglass and well-known scholar of the Civil War and memory, David Blight, stated, “Equality before the law is as profound and as threatening a principle as American politicians had faced since throwing off monarchy and inventing a republic.”1 Upton comes to this subject as an architectural historian, however. He brings forty years of prolific writing on ever widening range of architecture, material culture, urban form, and cultural landscape. While this is Upton’s first book-length treatment of commemoration, What Can and Can’t be Said demonstrates some of his most ambitious achievements in integrating the study of physical form and social history. The subtlety of analysis begins with a title that questions two cornerstones of the book: the Euro-American monument tradition, and the actual placement and reception of the monuments. What goes into the conception, siting, fabrication, and placement of civil rights commemorations? How are the monuments received by different parties? How does their setting affect the monuments, or conversely, how does their placement affect the setting in which they are placed, or does it? Upton encourages always asking the questions: “Who are the stakeholders? Who has a rightful claim to that authority? With whose voice will a monument speak? Who is the primary audience? Whom should it be?” (24). Such a simple and direct line of questioning opens a fascinating and multilayered study of commemoration clearly demonstrating the expressiveness of material culture, the nature of history, why cultural landscape is so essential, and the power of fieldwork. The first question of what a monument can say, is for Upton a call to examine the typology from its very foundations. Stated simply, A monument is a very special kind of object. It has to present its case in a compacted manner, pressing familiar images and metaphors into its service. Such conventional imagery is necessary for monuments to be legible to a broad public. (Upton, 7,9) He introduces typical civil rights forms of the funereal marker, great leader monument, populist monuments, and general African American history monuments in the context of the already-existing Euro-American traditions of equestrian monuments, common funereal commemoration, and the all-pervasive influences of war memorials, and Christian themed variations. “What,” he asks, can and can’t be said within the established visual conventions of the Euro-American monument building tradition, which were created to celebrate signal leaders and momentous, temporally and geographically constricted events such as battles, rather than long-term struggles by diffuse masses of people? (Upton, 13) There is, of course, no single, easy answer and so Upton addresses the typologies and various formal issues in a dispersed manner throughout the text in the context of examining actual monuments in their settings. As Upton shows, local constituencies have much to say about issues such as visual resemblance, but the discussion can be richly colored by characterization. Iconography arises as an important topic, but it is shaped by concerns over issues such as the nationality of the sculptor. Formal aesthetic issues exist, therefore, but usually only in a range of discussion shaped as much by politics and history as by art. Ironically, sometimes, the actual monument disappears in the midst of swirling discussions of the issues surrounding it. The second question suggested by the phrase, “what can and can’t be said” regards the various social processes involved in getting the monument done. “Dual heritage” permeates the entire volume and is used to express the ideological stand-off between whites and blacks and their respective senses of self. Segregation, in other words, affects not only society but historical memory as well. Any visitor to a former Confederate state needs only go to a town’s central square to see the ubiquitous markers of Confederate pride—white pride. Notably, they are nearly identical to those erected by the Union victors. The Confederates lost the Civil War, but they won the peace through asserting their undying chivalry and valor. This high-minded mythologizing ultimately melded North and South in a reconciliation based on ennobling whites, and on the universal denigration and discrimination of blacks. Civil Rights achievements for blacks came with freedom and Reconstruction, but were steadily undercut and erased by whites determined to maintain their dominance. Upton shows that this narrative continues in the later twentieth century as increasingly beleaguered and hostile whites struggle to maintain their authority in a modernizing world. In 2000, in Selma, Alabama, neo-Confederates erected a bust of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a “slave dealer and owner and [who] served as one of the heads of the Ku Klux Klan” (Upton, 40). While the insensitivity of such commemoration was striking, and drew widespread criticism, even more disturbing were the increasingly refined defensive tactics used by the neo-Confederates asserting their rights to such supremacist monuments in a “pluralist, relativist language of tolerance and ethnic victimization” (Upton, 45). Claiming a vision based on the Bible, the neo-Confederate group the League of the South asserted their belief in a “natural societal order of superiors and subordinates” and used language of “implication and deniability” to avoid reprisal (Upton, 45-46). Neo-Confederates consistently replaced inconvenient specifics with self-affirming abstractions conflating history with heritage. Such efforts have not gone well. The Forrest monument ultimately disappeared. With prideful markers of white supremacy in every town square, African Americans were left the option of loyalty, subservience, or a carefully constructed sense of social uplift, another of Upton’s core components in looking at the social dynamics of civil rights commemoration. In a chapter cleverly titled “Accentuating the Positive,” Upton explains civil rights monuments as earnestly being about African American history, not just memory. The monuments were meant to speak the truth and were made to “instruct future generations” (Upton, 21). The concept of racial uplift meant the necessity of demonstrating African American advancement and the insistence that this history be positive, and not “offend white people” (Upton, 23). Forcing this ideal into actual monumental form was not always possible. In 2000, the Caroline County, Virginia Tourism Advisory Committee thought they could attract more visitors with more attention paid to African American history. The county happened to be one site of Gabriel’s Rebellion, a high-minded and ambitiously conceived but ultimately thwarted eighteenth-century slave uprising. It was also the location of the unprecedented interracial marriage of Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving, which was illegal at the time and for which they were arrested, but whose subsequent Supreme Court case allowed interracial marriage. A proposal for a monument commemorating these historical events resulted in several months of public bickering and only ended by creating a much watered-down multicultural monument with no mention of Gabriel’s rebellion, and only including Mildred Loving and the right of interracial marriage at the bottom of a list of black office holders. For progress to be noted, it had to be noncontroversial, or heavily watered down. In Savannah, Georgia, it took eleven years of vociferous personal and bureaucratic wrangling to align the powers necessary to erect an African American monument. The result was a stolid, but somewhat shell-shocked-looking African American middle-class family bunched together above clear reminders of slavery in imagery and text. Upton shows how the family is portrayed in a version of a “deliverance” or “ascension” model and uses the statue of Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee University “removing the veil of ignorance from a freed black man” (83-84) as an example. Suitably, Washington’s role as a chief advocate of uplift and accommodation makes this model particularly resonant. The muted uplift of the family proved acceptable to most Savannah officials and the public, but the slavery references remained beyond the pale and required editing for approval. James Kimble, a local artist dissatisfied with the statue’s obsequious depiction of lukewarm uplift, and free of the southern code of politeness, responded by creating his own “Black Holocaust Memorial” out of papier-mâché showing a black man straining from his chains while on an auction block, surrounded by a woman and two children. While such overt drama was unthinkable in most officially commissioned artwork, Upton repeatedly shows how intricacies and subtleties of southern social and political dynamics shaped the monuments in striking and meaningful ways. Having established the parameters of the social shaping of the commemorative landscape, Upton turns to a series of chapters focused on relatively famous civil rights monuments, the first addressing what most would consider the most iconic of civil rights subjects, Martin Luther King, Jr. Acknowledging King statues as part of a “great leader” monument typology, Upton dryly refers to their being generally “bland” (Upton, 98) in physical appearance. Their importance lies in the expectations brought to them—by whites who seek a social integrationist, and by blacks who look for a “champion and intercessor.” The story traverses from Birmingham, Alabama to Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and ultimately to the Tidal Basin off the National Mall in Washington, D. C. where the sculpture of “A Stern-Faced, Twenty-Eight-Foot-Tall Black Man,” Upton’s chapter title, had a twenty-eight-year gestation (Upton, 110). The journey shows us a range from sincere devotion to unbelievable hostility. Officials in Rocky Mount had their statue of King sawn off at the ankles because an influential contingent of people could not believe that the statue actually depicted King. The Washington King Memorial is likewise shaped by established standards regarding the form, as well as a complex process, partisan politicking, and spirited popular reception. Upton follows each discrete channel of discussion, including the official register engaged with initiating, designing, revising, and ultimately approving the memorial form, as well as an entirely separate and more vociferous public register, including internet-based blogs and websites aimed at African Americans, artists, and political interest groups (110-111). Ultimately we see King enthroned in the American Valhalla near the likes of Lincoln and Jefferson and Roosevelt, but Upton makes clear through many details that “the price of ‘universalizing’ the King Memorial was to excise it from African American social history,” and to suppress “specific meanings of his words, reducing them to aphorisms” (Upton, 116, 118). As Upton states, King was excised from history; removed from his adversarial role toward the state, its agents, and many of its citizens; and recast as a tutelary deity for the populace at large, a fount of generic and unthreatening aphorisms about “hope, democracy, and love.” (116) Hence, one should go and see the monument, but realize that it is predictable, and ultimately disappointing, what one critic called “a few clichéd metaphors” (Upton, 132), but the overall story of how it got that way is of deep significance and meaning. Upton’s analysis of King monuments demonstrates his deft ability in addressing formal properties. But even with such a monumental focus, the emphasis on setting, context, and divergent views ultimately addresses not privileged art, but objects of material culture in a cultural landscape. Although not called out here in a methodological way, probably because he had already done that in decades past, Upton’s consistent contextualization of sites and events allows one to appreciate diverse and multifaceted places developed over time by many different people’s input: One examines a statue or memorial, not as an embodiment of a singular viewpoint, but as a less than seamless manifestation of disparate ideas. It is in the negotiation that the historical and political qualities of monuments emerge, not from static memory. (24) It is particularly powerful that a history of the commemoration of a marginalized group be done in such a manner that privileges social context over traditional formal concerns. This perspective literally allows the very subject to be appreciated. Upton clearly contests old time-worn master narratives and demonstrates the benefits of a more egalitarian and honest approach. No place receives a more nuanced look at spatial territories and ideological boundaries than Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham, Alabama. Black–white relations and tensions between progressives and conservatives in the Civil Rights movement shaped the park over the course of thirty years. “Popular expectations that monuments be positive and conciliatory” (Upton, 160) shaped the monument design process, although the black Mayor Arrington’s electoral majority allowed sharper realism of white terrorism than typically depicted. The confining stigma of white supremacy was pushed back, but Upton shows how a ring of relatively early and innocuous uplift sculptures surround the harder hitting images of conflict. Actual visual formulas still rely on the familiar model of the great leader and epic battle scenarios, but Upton asserts that such “an elaborately organized site such as Kelly Ingram Park represents not a memory but an interpretation or interpretations of specific events, offered in the context of contemporary ideological and political struggles” (Upton, 171). Intriguing, but not fully fleshed out are Upton’s observations regarding the erasure of the neighborhood surrounding this commemorative landscape, even when literalism was such an important theme. What is the place of historic preservation for African Americans? Upton’s ability to reveal a landscape that many may not have even known existed would not be possible without his rigorous fieldwork, an activity he shares with the other authors under review, but one that he clearly takes to another level. Readers will genuinely feel as if they have traversed the full breadth of the old Confederacy, and of a newer, somewhat more tentative landscape incorporating civil rights. From the mention of the homeless person calling the monuments in Kelly Ingram park something done by “near whites” (Upton, 23) to the remarkable reporting of seeing two sisters spreading their mother’s ashes under the statue of King (Upton, 98) to an African American police officer quoted at the dedication of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest as a “Klan meeting without the hoods” (Upton, 34), and to the personal photographs of each site, Upton is out in the sites gathering data. Upton suggests one should go to the South Carolina State House grounds. They are a treat, even if one has to make their way through a “white supremacist pantheon” to reach Ed Dwight’s African American History Monument. The inclusion of so many sites like Philadelphia, Mississippi, or the Black Holocaust Memorial in Savannah are not on most itineraries, but are nevertheless telling and important. The intrepid visiting, observing, photographing, and then reporting provide a tangible vibrancy to this study. Ultimately all three scholars clearly express what Young states, again and again, that “a need for a unified vision of the past as found in the traditional monument necessarily collides with the modern conviction that neither the past nor its meaning are ever just one thing” (14). History, heritage, memory, commemoration, and the monument all highlight different facets of the past and the present. Where these authors differ is how to register that difference. Frohne’s study is a daunting search from the beginning and a jamboree of reification at the end. Young’s theme is that no matter what any one of us might think or feel, the search is precious and the expression of commemoration must be inclusive. Upton finds so many solutions seeming so determined and clear, but they are filled with cracks, frought with contest, and not at peace. So, Upton investigates and analyzes, Young guides and reassures, and Frohne records and celebrates. Each finds a truth very worthy of attention. Commemoration is a prominent juncture of people and their public presence. People attempt to speak through monuments, but their obdurate form, weighted down with such strong traditional associations, makes for an imperfect vehicle, and so they have sought alternate media and counter-monuments. But, as it turns out, the ordinary monument itself, which is still so common, is just an inkling of the truly operatic sagas put on behind the scenes of its creation.