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The Costs of Memory and Ethical Economies of (Un)Just Remembrance

Submitted to Program Units
1: Religion and Economy Unit and Religion and Memory Unit

Rebecca Bartel, San Diego State University, Presiding

Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

This panel explores metaphors and practices of painful and potentially costly memory. The papers focus on the ethics of remebering and the stakes of collective memory in processes of justice. How, the papers ask, does studying religion and the capital costs of remembering inform the ways that the economies of memory are tied to power?

Papers

  • Laura Simpson, Villanova University

    Narrative and Reproductions of Power at the Prison Museum

    Abstract

    Amid growing public enthusiasm for “dark tourism” excursions—that is, travel to locations featuring an engagement with the deathly, horrific, or macabre—the American prison museum has become an increasingly lucrative site of intellectual and affective stimulation. Over the last two decades, an expanding collection of scholarship in the fields of architecture, history, sociology, and criminology has sought to address the purpose, appeal, and ethics of the prison museum, with particular attention to its role as a site of cultural memory and meaning-making. The present paper builds on this literature to explore the ways that the prison museum functions temporally – that is, how it reproduces (and occasionally refuses) linear understandings of time that underwrite popular appeals to American progress.

  • Zachary Taylor, University of Chicago

    The Costs of Unjust Memory in Augustine’s City of God

    Abstract

    In a recent essay, Richard Miller claims that Augustine presumes a duty to remember justly in the *City of God*. However, Miller’s cursory reference to a presumed duty of “just memory” does not explain how Augustine conceptualizes this duty, or how it relates to his theological concerns. In this paper, I demonstrate how Augustine presumes a duty to remember truly for the sake of justice in the *City of God*. I first analyze the relationship between forgetting and the earthly city, then explain how the earthly city’s logic of forgetting contributes to a false remembrance that denies the suffering of empire’s victims. Ultimately, I conclude that Augustine understands just remembrance as an obligation of properly ordered love. For Augustine, our failure to fulfill this obligation comes at the cost of a distorted view of the created order that inhibits our capacity for loving relation with God and other persons.

  • Jeannine Hill Fletcher, Fordham University

    The Price and Pain of Memory: Institutional Reckoning with White Supremacy

    Abstract

    For nearly twenty years, institutions of higher education have been increasingly coming to terms with their histories of racial violence involved with slavery and its afterlives.  From the 2006 Brown University Slavery and Justice Report to the 2024 Yale & Slavery Research Project, the work of recovering histories has become a practice of institutional reckoning.  It is, in a sense, a project that requires reconstituting painful memories that have been willfully erased.  Following the theoretical path of Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, this work of uncovering histories and reconstituting institutional memory is part of the truth-telling necessary as a first step to healing from our national trauma of White supremacy and racism. But what are the many costs -- financial, emotional, personal and institutional -- for doing this essential work?

Responding
Timothy Rainey, St. Olaf College
Audiovisual Requirements

Resources

LCD Projector and Screen

Comments

For consideration by the Religion, Affect and Emotion Unit, I would be interested in sharing this from an experiential perspective in a lightening session format.

Full Papers Available

No
Program Unit Options

Session Length

2 Hours

Schedule Preference

Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Schedule Info

Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Tags

#prisonmuseum
#darktourism
#temporality
#progress
#narrative
#memory
#augustine
#City of God
#theology
#Politics

Session Identifier

A23-134