"'If you go there – you who was never there': On Contemporary Uses of the Memory of Slavery"

The current escalation in the number of acts of public memorialization of past wrongs towards African Americans - namely, slavery and segregation - is frequently related to the Obama presidency, as a positive side effect of the first black presidency in the United States. Most attempts at building a public memory of slavery have been under attack for offering an edulcorated, progressive narrative of the past that does not really challenge the exceptionalist mythology of the United States. Since memory is an ever-changing representation of the past that does not aim at establishing the truth, but rather at highlighting what parts of the past are important for the present, it is inevitably a source of controversies and a site where competing versions of the past clash: who decides what stories to select and what to discard as marginal?