Black Memory Landscapes

Black Memory Landscapes: Sites of Remembrance and Resistance offers a wide-ranging exploration of how Black communities remember and commemorate their histories. In doing so, the volume demonstrates how Black activism, critical scholarship, and local memory practices combine to identify and enact new perspectives on memory landscapes in the USA and across the globe.

From museums and memorials in commemorative landscapes to everyday lived landscapes and spaces where stories circulate, remembered Black stories express resilience, community, and hope among memory landscapes often dominated by hegemonic histories. Black Memory Landscapes: Sites of Remembrance and Resistance presents a broad array of powerful stories and interrogates how they challenge and extend traditional understandings of memory landscapes. The volume covers a wide range of topics, from legacies of slavery to the Civil Rights Movement and contemporary issues of racial justice, and features case studies based on traditional commemorative landscapes like Freedom Park in North Carolina and New York City’s African Burial Ground, as well as new locations such as the Paul Robeson House and Museum in Philadelphia. Featuring both established and emerging scholars of Black public memory from a range of disciplines, Black Memory Landscapes: Sites of Remembrance and Resistance examines how stories of Black history have emerged in commemorative landscapes, are appearing in new commemorative locations, have surfaced in other spaces of memory, and are intertwined with the African diaspora.

The volume offers a wide-ranging analysis for those who wish to understand how memory continues to resonate among Black Americans as a form of commemoration, a means of organising, and a source of inspiration. This volume will therefore be of interest to researchers, academics and students with interests in memory and heritage, African American studies, and the history of the USA.