Slavery, Freedom, and the Nation: Narratives of Liberation in the Museum of African American History and Culture

Abstract

In 2004, Susan Sontag noted in 'Regarding the Pain of Others' that there is no national memory museum dedicated to minorities who suffered persecution within the United States, while the Holocaust was memorialized in a museum on the National Mall. She concluded that this omission was rooted in a US exceptionalism that refused to acknowledge crimes against humanity, which occurred on American ground. Walter Benn Michaels made a similar point in 2006, which prompted Michael Rotherg’s rejection of competitive memory and the development of his theory published in Multidirectional Memory in 2009. Since Sontag’s essay, the National Mall has seen important additions. In this paper, I will re-visit Sontag’s and Michaels’ assessment considering the additions to the Mall by focusing on the new African American museum, which I contend did not significantly change the nation’s remembrance discourse as Sontag had implied. By emphasizing the themes of liberation, freedom, and achievement throughout its exhibitions, and through spatial arrangements of the different exhibitions in the building, the museum invokes the foundational myth of US national ideology. Instead of a fundamental critique of the national myth of the Founding Fathers and freedom as an ideology, the museum ultimately reaffirms American national ideologies by embracing the US constitution and suggesting that the liberation of African Americans was already installed at the beginning. also argue that the African American museum paradoxically supports US patriotism just like the Holocaust museum. The latter achieves this through emphasizing the US as liberators of death camps, whereas the former foregrounds the trope of African American liberation. More importantly, the museums employ contrasting narrative strategies to remember past trauma and to memorialize victims.