This session examines the methods used to celebrate overlooked Black experiences or memorialize previously anonymous victims of violence. The panel is inspired by the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice which fosters mobility, exchange, and revision. The memorial consists of steel markers etched with the names of lynching victims and the locations in which lynchings took place. Residents of lynching locations are encouraged to install replicas of the markers in their home sites, collect soil from the lynching site in special jars, and return the jars to EJI as part of a “Community Remembrance Project”; new jars are added as research uncovers past lynchings. The remembrance project is just one version of what Sarah Nance calls portable “experiences of memorialization”: “Unlike a fixed statue, plaque, or museum,” these memorials “can be moved.” The panel explores how this description applies not only to artwork or exhibits but also documents and literary texts. Literary memorials consisting of postcards, prose, and poems can be revised, emended, altered, and “repeatedly placed in new contexts” (“Memorial Time,” Arizona Quarterly).

The panel begins with an exemplary item of a portable archive—the postcard. Michael Hall studies the visual rhetorics and commemorative value of the postcard in “Between History and Memory: African Americans and the Postcard.” Based on extensive archival research, Hall details the competing narratives that surface between history and memory when examining race in multiple documents related to the travel and leisure industry. Studying postcards created by Black companies, Hall analyzes how these ephemera document the emergence of a robust Black leisure and hospitality industry; and, as souvenirs, frame how Black subjects remember their travel activities. In the past, the visual rhetoric of vacation postcards excluded images of Blacks unless they were depicted as service workers. Mid-20^th-century Black postcards, however, advertise experiences of travel Black patrons might enjoy. In contrast to the too-familiar lynching postcards of the past, Black postcards have subversive potential and memorialize Black pleasure/leisure activities.

The panel continues with Miriam Thaggert’s analysis of a key component of the NMPJ, the names of victims. In “Literary Memorials: Names and Lists in Contemporary Black Literature” Thaggert compares two books that contains lists of names of individuals killed by extra-judicial or anti-Black violence, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014) and Percival Everett’s The Trees (2021). While Citizen’s onomastic list is of recent murders of African Americans, The Trees reaches back into America’s long history of violence against Black, Asian, and Native Americans. Like EJI’s exhibition of continually updated jars of lynching soil as more lynchings are discovered, Rankine’s and Everett’s lists are revised as anti-Black violence continues. Arguing that the printing of these names is a form of reparative/retributive justice, Thaggert demonstrates how The Trees and especially Citizen, with its visual blurring of names in successive editions, illustrate the temporal dynamics at play in what she calls “literary reparative” work: They present a strategy of revision to address the exhaustive attempt to “keep up” with the never-ending violence against nonwhites in this country.

The panel concludes with a paper that draws on Hall’s visual rhetorics while questioning how victims of violence are remembered, as in Thaggert’s paper. Sarah Nance in “An American Poetics: Claudia Rankine and Visual Art’s Memorial Modes,” contrasts stationary and portable memorials created for victims of violence. Like Citizen, Rankine’s Just Us: An American Conversation (2020) creates a memorial project through the inclusion of eclectic materials—photographs, artwork, video stills and personal “notes”—to reimagine the formal monuments of American life. In this multigeneric text, Rankine creates memorial space through visual imagery: photos of the Washington Monument that excise the white, phallic signifier; facsimile pages from Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia with the application of erasure poetics; an “All Lives Matter” poster with the center “V” faded out so it reads “Lies” instead. In navigating the tension between traditional, stationary memorials and portable, mutable memorial modes, Nance argues that Rankine uses visual art and various textual techniques to account for those excluded from the white, patriarchal vision of American memory.

Ben Railton, who publishes on American public history and memory, moderates the 75-minute panel. Each paper is 15 to 20 minutes long, leaving 15 to 20 minutes for Q&A. Like the individual documents and texts on which they are centered, the papers collectively help us understand history, memory, and visuality in the past and our contemporary moment. The panelists teach at a range of public institutions and will attract MLA members interested in Black studies, archives, history, visual culture, and memory.