The Politics of Memory at the Legacy Museum in Montgomery: Toward a Radical Practice of History

Writing in the wake of WWI and against the backdrop of the rise of fascism in Germany, Walter Benjamin argued for a particularly urgent and politically engaged form of materialist history. “Articulating the past historically,” writes Benjamin, “does not mean recognizing it ‘the way it really was.’ It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger.” In this paper I will plan to articulate the vital, but largely untheorized, role for memory in a politically engaged materialist form of history because of its complex temporality. To flesh out the dynamics of such a mode of history, as well as why it’s politically necessary at the current conjuncture, I will focus on the recently opened “Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration” in Montgomery, Alabama, which is, in a fundamental sense, a memory museum, and yet one with a historical agenda. As its name suggests, the Legacy Museum foregrounds the ramifications of slavery and white supremacy for the present, arguing that a racial remembering is required to render the present legible in a new way, a way that might catalyze political changes in the present. I will argue that its radical engagement with temporality—its pairing of enslavement with mass incarceration as mirror images of each other—is a strategy bringing the present to crisis precisely by disrupting the temporal schema and chronology of conventional academic history narratives.