by Timothy J. McMillan
The following essay originally appeared in Silence, Screen and Spectacle: Rethinking Social Memory in the Age of Information. This book is now available in paperback.
In 2001, I began teaching a first-year seminar titled “Defining Blackness.” My journey with that class and its descendants is intertwined with my relationship with the memorial landscape, concrete and virtual, of the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In its initial year, the class decided to take as its focus the idea of how blackness, specifically American blackness, might mediate and alter how people experience the physical campus. In class discussions we surmised that there is a segregation of knowledge and of perception that might become manifest by examining the memorial landscape and that there are aspects of the campus that might be invisible to some but highly charged to others. Continue reading “Remembering Forgetting: A Monument to Erasure at the University of North Carolina”