ABSTRACT
The modality with which we engage the past has the potential to open up or foreclose politics. This chapter considers the different temporal structures of history and memory, and the political implications of those differences, by analyzing the exhibition logics and strategies at the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, in Montgomery, Alabama. The chapter begins by briefly outlining the epistemological underpinnings of modern western history writing, and in particular its insistence on a temporal break between the past and the present, in order to underscore history's difference from the modality of memory, which is more fluid, and which tends to resist neat and fixed divisions between past and present. The chapter argues that in its very self-conception, in its understanding of the relationship between the past and the present, the Legacy Museum is a memory museum. Rather than rehearsing the well-worn popular historical narrative of racial progress in the United States, which is premised on change over time, the Legacy Museum aims to emphasize the ways in which aspects of “the past” are fully animate in the present. Furthermore, this chapter argues that because of its particular mode of address to visitors, one that aims at political activation, the museum itself participates in a form of memory activism.
