Mourning in America

New York is in the grip of memorial mania, writes Tiffany Jenkins

Instead of celebrating kings and generals on granite pedestals, there is now a growing body of what Erika Doss, author of Memorial Mania, terms ‘shame-based’ memorials, such as those which uncover a murky and neglected past, dealing with slavery, lynching and so on. No one would want to return to the days of old but traditional memorials did at least present people as history makers, rather than as passive objects of history.

Consider the African Burial Ground: New York Governor David Paterson has dubbed it ‘our Ellis Island’, after the island off the southern tip of Manhattan that was the gateway for millions of immigrants between 1892 and 1954, and which now houses an Immigration Museum. The African Burial Ground is historically significant but it is no Ellis Island: there is an important difference between marking a cemetery and a port that was a gateway to the future. One is a place of death and a focal point for suffering and grief, while the other signals the start of a new life — for immigrants and for a country.

You have to ask, when does remembering become morbid? An excessive preoccupation with the past is usually a sign that something is missing in the present. At times it is good for people to move on. But today, in New York City, monuments to the dead are multiplying. The City That Never Sleeps is taking too much time to mourn.

Tiffany Jenkins is a sociologist and a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics.

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Louis Torres

September 1st, 2010 7:47pm Report this comment

Two corrections: "Great men" do not have "victims," and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial does not "[separate] the soldier from the war" and focus on the "casualties." Only the Maya Lin's Wall Memorial at the site does this.

The other two official components of the VVM are "Three Fighting Men" (Frederick Hart) and the Vietnam Woman's Memorial (Glenna Goodacre). By now this should be common knowledge, especially among critics and scholars who write about the arts. See http://dc.about.com/od/monuments/p/VietnamMemorial.htm for further information.

Louis Torres, Co-Editor, Aristos (An Online Review of the Arts) - http://www.aristos.org

Tom Freudenheim

September 2nd, 2010 10:39am Report this comment

Good piece, Tiffany! There's a kind of shortsightedness that assumes these memorials will have a long life and forever resonate to future generations the way they resonate to those who want to create them for their own personal purposes.

cyrus forman

September 2nd, 2010 8:21pm Report this comment

Did you tour the visitors center or read any of the displays at the African Burial Ground? The "morbid focus on victimization" that you imply is part and parcel of the African Burial Ground could not be further from the truth. The African Burial Ground celebrates the lives of our african founders here in new york and details the role Africans played in creating our city. Would you prefer that we simply ignored this archaeological discovery and continued to ignore the story of New York's African Founders?

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