Undergraduate Thesis…

uncast shadow of a southern myth: An analysis of erasure and memory in Memphis, TN

I observed Memphis at a young age as an example of the American economic disruptions as a result in some institutional negligence. When offered the chance to critique and breakdown the complexities of the city, I knew the narrative I wanted to create had to include a disparity that didn’t only explain the landscape, but also a community that was not my own. What became clear to me was that Memphis’ representations of space speaks to destruction and disturbances in history, but do not affect the lives of my family and friends other than offering a disturbed landscape. What became apparent was the segregation that bleeds into the community.

I had to answer: why was my social community so void of people of color? The only place I found an integrated society in Memphis was within the music community. This thesis works as a critique of the perception of the south from me, a white privileged person, and how to show a perceptive breakdown of the complex relationship between my childhood naiveties and a space catering to my identity.

Memory studies, city planning records, and the history of tourism all combined can explain the systematic erasure and efforts to appropriate Black culture. This thesis became not a record of my experience within Memphis, but a piece to represent a system that attempts to erase a collective and complete memory of a community that I do not belong to.

I give an overview of Memphis as a place of cultural production led by the post-civil war migration into urbanized cities powerfully controlled by the white agenda but only capable of existing because of the predominantly Black lower and middle class. By using sites of memory over contested understandings of the city, we can begin to locate the identity politics in relationship to collective memory and whose history is archived and memorialized while also considering whose history is forgotten.

The act of preservation is seen within Memphis in limited but powerful  forms. The protection of this history perpetuates an imperialist and colonialist mindset and infers a congruent history. Seen here, a statute of the late Nathan Bedford Forrest was recently removed. Forrest was the first grand wizard of the KKK and was responsible for thousands of black lives lost in the civil war. In these public structures, the past becomes articulated indirectly through representations of a homogenous past not inclusive of the population of the oppressed. I investigate the process of monumentation of these structures. Next slide Philosopher Dylan Trigg asks “How can such a block of mass assume a role in the public’s imagination, such that the construction of a “public memory” is inaugurated?”

Scholar and Author Wanda Rushing says “Paradoxically, objects of commemoration are intended to convey authority, stability, and permanence, but they serve as reminders of disruptions, discontinuities, and divisions” (Rushing, 2009) Without contingent public memory, these structures offer a dominating symbol of city priority.

Within my work, I point to housing projects, historical spaces of civil rights movements, and the complexities within destruction, erasure, and fabricated memory.

I turn to the tourist industry in Memphis and how it creates a public identity and what Wanda Rushing titles the “tourist gaze”. Rushing states  “All indicators suggest that the global appeal of tourism and the development of local cultural resources will continue to influence the development of downtown memphis for some time to come. But questions have emerged about the impact of the local tourism industry on Memphis, the place of cultural heritage and innovation.” She also says ““It becomes not only a place to be seen and heard but also a product to be sold”

I accompany my thesis with a film representative of my personal memory. Through memory studies, we can mediate the organization of subordinate representation. Documenting and organizing a childlike nostalgia, is my way of creating a slowness uninhibited by a connotative future.   

Growing up, my experience of the American South was fragmented by short experiences of family visits. The images of Tennessee ingrained in my childhood included countless brick-lined abandoned buildings that were either condemned or now otherwise demolished and vacant and forgotten lots often filled with trash and overgrown with disorderly southern foliage. The roadways were mangled and crumbling and often hazardous. Telephone wires, iconic but dated signage, and countless other representations of an outdated and crumbling city dominated my memory. Throughout time, I came to acknowledge much of this imagery as reminders of the identity of Memphis. These memories of the south were contained in an innate and indispensable sense of nostalgia that I hold onto even today. My film is used as a way to categorize my own memories as a way to site memory. I reference Jim Jarmusch's film “Mystery Train”, which depicts long drawn out shots of walking or driving through Memphis and unite characters through ghosts within the city, all reminiscent of Memphis musical past. Using super 8 film, I attempt to evoke the same nostalgia I feel while driving throughout the city.