Scribd
Upload
6 views4 pages

Articles Review.edited 1

The article discusses the complexities of memorializing slavery in the United States through public monuments, focusing on artists like John Quincy Adams Ward and Edmonia Lewis. It highlights various memorials, such as the Middle Passage Monument and the African American Monument in Savannah, and critiques their effectiveness in conveying the history of slavery. Ultimately, the article emphasizes the importance of public memory in shaping cultural narratives and understanding the past's relevance to contemporary society.

Uploaded by

briankiriinya7
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
6 views4 pages

Articles Review.edited 1

The article discusses the complexities of memorializing slavery in the United States through public monuments, focusing on artists like John Quincy Adams Ward and Edmonia Lewis. It highlights various memorials, such as the Middle Passage Monument and the African American Monument in Savannah, and critiques their effectiveness in conveying the history of slavery. Ultimately, the article emphasizes the importance of public memory in shaping cultural narratives and understanding the past's relevance to contemporary society.

Uploaded by

briankiriinya7
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 4

1

Article Summary/ Review

Student's Name

Institutional Affiliation

Course Number

Instructor’s Name

Date due
2

Article Summary/ Review

Article 1: Slavery and Its Memory in Public Monuments

The article “Slavery and Its Memory in Public Monuments” freely discusses the problems

of remembering slavery and obtaining freedom in the United States through public monuments.

In order to analyze the concerns of nineteenth-century artists, the author focuses on John Quincy

Adams Ward, Edmonia Lewis, and Tomas Ball, in particular in view of the significance of the

black body as well as the legacy of slavery (Ater, 2010). The article reveals the challenges of

designing the means of remembering the history of slavery since the very attempt to create

monuments that would inform the population on the actual history and provoke thinking and

remorse is problematic. It is then proposed to catalog the various strategies outlined earlier - the

Middle Passage Monument, the African American Monument in Savannah, Georgia, and the

North Carolina Freedom Monument Project in Raleigh – to demonstrate how theorists and

practitioners are approaching the memorialization of slavery (Ater, 2010). These monuments are

different and have different purposes, but as you can see, they all aim to make sure that people of

the future remember that slavery existed, though not all of them are successful in conveying such

a message as they are not able to capture the complexity and struggle behind such history.

The article also manages to draw attention to the challenges artists, together with

communities, go through when having to conduct and produce public art to remember slavery.

Drawing insights from various authors, the author gives a fairly balanced perspective about each

monument and what it seeks to achieve in dealing with the question of history or slavery in

particular (Ater, 2010). However, some of the critiques may seem mere hasty, like those targeted

at the African American Monument in Savannah. Of course, the article outlines the flaws of such

a message of the monument as well as the problems with the physical appearance of the
3

monument, but it may not fully embrace the fact that such a monument is needed in a city like

Savannah with its connection to slavery. However, in my opinion, the article still serves its

purpose in presenting the fact that people are still seeking a way to portray the theme as relevant

in the modern world while paying homage to the victims of slavery.

Thus, the article develops the understanding of messages and functions of public memory

and monuments in constructing slave narratives in the United States. In relation to the issues of

representing slavery and different ways of commemorating it, the article is linked to such

interdisciplinary topics as representation and memory, which can be studied in the frames of

history and cultural studies. It also links to the issues discussed in the class concerning the

reconstruction of history. Thus, the article emphasizes the continued relevance of the past as a

subject of practice and not just theoretical discussion but as moving sculptures and statues that

evoke people's thinking and discussion. This understanding of monuments as sites of memory

supports the movie's overall assertion that how a culture elects to remember the past affects how

it interprets its present and future situations.


4

References

Ater, R. (2010). Slavery and its memory in public monuments. American Art, 24(1), 20-23.

You might also like