Lecture: Dr. Dora Apel (Webinar)

Why We Need a National Lynching Memorial

This talk examines the controversy over a national lynching memorial and argues that how we remember the past is crucial to changing the present and future. The Memorial to Peace and Justice, dedicated to the nation’s thousands of lynching victims, and an accompanying museum on Black history from slavery to mass incarceration opened in Montgomery, Alabama, in the midst of resurgent white nationalism, continuing attacks on Blacks and people of color, debates over immigrants and refugees, and controversies over Confederate monuments. What is the political basis of white supremacist ideology? What is the role of women in white supremacist ideology? How does the ongoing construction of memory inherently structure a collective way of knowing that changes our understanding of racial and ethnic oppression and the ongoing struggles for equality and social justice?

Dora Apel is a cultural critic and art historian who writes about politics, culture, and visual imagery. Her focus is on traumatic imagery and memory, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, cities and ruins, war and the failures of capitalism. She is the author of six books, including Calling Memory into Place; Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline; War Culture and the Contest of Images; Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob; Lynching Photographs (co-authored with Shawn Michelle Smith); and Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing. She is the W. Hawkins Ferry Endowed Chair Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Wayne State  University.

Click here to join the meeting at 5pm on January 19th.